Zoom out: 26 years, every crash included.
Pick any five-year stretch of the Indian market and it contains a fall frightening enough to justify quitting. Stack the stretches together and the same chart tells the opposite story.
The dot-com bust erased the late-90s optimism. 2008 cut the index roughly in half. COVID removed a third in a month. The 2025 correction pushed smaller companies down by a quarter. Each of these, lived through in real time, felt like the event that finally proved the pessimists right.
And yet the line runs from about 1,000 to about 26,000: a 26-fold multiplication across 26 years that includes every one of those disasters. No crash was avoided, predicted or hedged in that number. They are all in there, fully absorbed, and the compounding still won by an enormous margin.
The practical conclusion is about attention, not courage: the shorter your viewing window, the more every wiggle looks like destiny. Match the chart you watch to the horizon you actually have. A retirement investor checking daily prices is reading someone else’s newspaper.
Twenty patient years at ordinary returns: that’s the zoomed-out chart for your own money.
Stylised path; start/end levels and drawdowns from NSE Nifty 50 data, 1999–2026. Past performance does not guarantee future returns. For education only, not advice. Prospar Consulting LLP.