Unshakeable: Your Financial Freedom Playbook

by Anthony Robbins

“Shouldn’t we get out of stocks now and go to cash?” they’d ask. “Doesn’t this crash feel different?” This reminded me of Sir John Templeton’s famous remark: “The four most expensive words in investing are ‘This time it’s different.’ ” In the midst of a market meltdown, people always think this time is different! Battered by all the bad news in the media each day, they begin to wonder if the market will ever recover—or if something has fundamentally broken that can’t be fixed. I kept reminding my clients that every bear market in US history has eventually become a bull market, regardless of how bleak the news seemed at the time. Just think of the many calamities and crises of the twentieth century: the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed as many as 50 million people worldwide; the Wall Street crash of 1929, followed by the Great Depression; two world wars; many other bloody conflicts, from Vietnam to the Gulf; the Watergate scandal that brought about the resignation of President Nixon; plus countless economic recessions and market panics. So how did the stock market fare in that chaos-filled century? The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose inexorably from 66 to 11,497. Here’s what you have to remember, based on more than a century of history: the short-term outlook may look dire, but the stock market always rebounds.