STORIES FROM THE FARM

The Lost Decade: What If You Held the S&P 500 From 2000 to 2009?

October 23, 2026 · The StockPets team · Updated October 28, 2026

“Hold the US market long enough and it always goes up.” You hear it all the time. Yet if you trusted that line and bought the S&P 500 in January 2000, you were still underwater ten years later. Let’s walk through the lost decade, when the dot-com crash and the financial crisis landed inside the same ten years, one month at a time.

2000 → 2009

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The lost decade in numbers

On price alone, the index lost about 24% over ten years. Even with dividends reinvested, a dollar invested at the start of 2000 was worth about 90 cents at the end of 2009. At the time, it was reported as the first calendar decade in which the S&P 500 finished with a negative return even counting dividends.

Trap #1: It didn’t break once. It broke twice

The 2000–2002 dot-com crash cut the index nearly in half, and it took five years, until October 2007, to climb back above the old peak. Then, less than a year and a half later, the financial crisis hit. People who had survived the first storm and seen the recovery got hit by a bigger one.

If a time traveler goes back armed only with “it goes up eventually,” that memory pays off later than expected. The index poked above its 2000 peak in 2007, fell back below it, and didn’t clearly top its 2007 peak until March 2013. For someone who bought in 2000, that’s a wait of nearly 13 years.

Trap #2: The index and your farm move differently

The S&P 500 gives bigger companies bigger weights. At the end of 1999, giant tech companies made up a huge share of the index, and they fell the hardest. The StockPets “crop average,” on the other hand, counts every crop equally.

So the game data tells a different story. Averaged with equal weights, the farm’s dot-com peak came in March 2002, not March 2000, and after the financial crisis it regained its 2007 high in February 2011, earlier than the index did in March 2013. The details are in Back to the dot-com bubble and Back to 2008.

Of course, planting every crop evenly isn’t something you can actually do in the game. Fields start at 3 plots and grow to a maximum of 11. Depending on what you choose, the same ten years can be a lost decade or not.

Trap #3: Ten years is long in real life too

January 2000 through December 2009 is 120 calendar turns. After the first 12 months you can move at most three months a day, so the 2000s alone take about 40 days of real time. Pets become juveniles at 12 months and adults at 36 months, so your pet may grow up and welcome the next generation along the way.

Your room moves through the computer era and into the smartphone era in 2007. The decade stops being a single number and becomes 120 scenes in your album. The eras are explained in StockPets eras and real news.

Trap #4: No dividends makes the game feel colder

StockPets crops pay no cash dividends, and prices are adjusted only for stock splits. So the same decade can look colder in the game than the real total return with dividends reinvested. For the S&P 500 in the 2000s, price alone was about −24%, while reinvesting dividends brought it to about −10%. How prices are converted is explained in stock splits and adjusted prices.

What you take away

This doesn’t mean “long-term investing wins in the end” is wrong. It means you rarely know how long “in the end” can be until you live through it. Walk through the 2000s one month at a time, and what stays with you isn’t the number at the end but how many times you wanted to clear your fields along the way.

For the storms that came after this decade, read Back to March 2020 and Back to 2022.

StockPets is a game that uses virtual coins only. Nothing on this page is investment advice, and past price changes do not predict future results.