The author of this essay doesn't mention Y2K. He doesn't need to.

Tactics and Trade-offs

A few snippets from this 7-page .pdf document:

"In this century, excluding the 1929 Crash... Bear markets average almost 1 1/2 years in length. Bear markets average a -32% loss in blue chip indexes. Once started, bear markets average over 2 1/2 years to recover. But often, the real question facing investors is not how long it takes to recoup ones losses  but how soon your portfolio can get back to where it would have been if sitting in cash. In such real dollar terms, its not uncommon to require a decade or more to recover from a bear market, particularly a bear like 1929, 1969, or 1973 that strikes when the Price/Dividend Ratio shows stocks are richly overpriced."

"In a bear market, an investors portfolio loss usually far exceeds the drop in the blue chip DJIA or S&P 500 Index. One reason is that these averages are price and capitalization weighted, respectively. In other words, they give far greater weight to high priced stocks and large-cap companies."

"Our deep respect for historical risk comes from the time-proven lesson that profit opportunities always come around again... lost capital in a bear market does not."

-- Tom Carey (tomcarey@mindspring.com), October 19, 1999