This week is the 30-year anniversary of the 1987 crash. Can you believe it?

Appropriately or ominously (depending on your view), the market continues its eight-year march up the charts.

Nowadays, it’s setting records with each new high it hits.

Are investors nervous? Should they be?

This bull market is old by historical standards. At 102 months, only the 115-month bull market of the 1990s lasted longer post-WWII.

If that doesn’t make one a tad nervous, the stock market has been undergoing a shocking under-the-radar reduction: from 7,500 publicly listed companies in the 1990s all the way down to fewer than 4,100 today.

I could go on. It’s almost too easy to poke holes in the current bull… not enough job growth, a large (and growing) amount of public debt, flat wages, etc.

But the ultimate arbiter of how the economy is doing is the market itself. And the only trend that counts is the current trend.

In the short term, the trend is your friend.

So I’m not going to worry about tomorrow or next week. The market has made utter fools of those who do.

But that won’t stop me from asking an increasingly critical question for investors…

What is the long-term upside of the public stock market? Or put another way…

When the bull degrades into a bear (and at some point it will), what are the pros and cons of staying in the stock market?

Red-Letter Day

Japanese stock investors recently welcomed a long-awaited milestone.

It took 21 years. But last week, the Nikkei stock market hit a new high. It blew past its previous peak reached on December 5, 1996.

The Japanese have learned the hard way what “slow and steady” means.

The opportunity costs of riding the Japanese market down and then up were significant.

What stock markets could they have invested in during those years? Let’s take a look at some numbers I dug up…

We know that the U.S. markets did well, even taking into account the 2000 to 2002 crash. But that pales in comparison to Indonesia’s and India’s market performance. They rose tenfold in the last 20 years. Even China’s up and down market went up by more than 3.5 times.