#MARKETS & INVESTING
Stepping out of the market “just until it blows over” has cost more than every crisis it was meant to avoid.
Published on August 11, 2026
J.P. Morgan Asset Management runs the same simulation every year in its Guide to Retirement: $10,000 invested in the S&P 500, dividends reinvested, from January 2, 2006 to December 31, 2025. The investor who stayed continuously in the market ends with $80,619. The one who missed the ten best trading days of the period ends with $35,866. The data come from Morningstar Direct.
What if you miss even more?
Missing twenty sessions brings the capital down to $21,177. Thirty, to $13,826. Sixty, to $4,966 — less than the initial stake, over twenty years of a rising market.
In other words: ten sessions out of roughly five thousand, or two-tenths of a percent of the time, account for more than half the final result.
Three caveats, because they matter
- The simulation is before fees and taxes. It illustrates a mechanism, it isn't reproducible as-is.
- The symmetric exercise also holds: avoiding the ten worst sessions would improve the result just as much. The figure doesn't prove staying invested is optimal, it proves that timing gets expensive when you get it wrong.
- The best and worst sessions tend to sit close together. They cluster during periods of high volatility — exactly when you're tempted to sell.
Why it still matters: the challenge isn't predicting the market, it's not being absent when it rebounds. It's a matter of behavior, not analysis.
For you
- The last time you sold, did you know when you'd buy back in?
- Does your allocation let you ride out a 30% drop without touching it?
Source: J.P. Morgan Asset Management, Guide to Retirement 2026, “Returns of the S&P 500” (Morningstar Direct data).
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