Trends take a lot longer to play out than you think.
For example, people started saying that tech stocks were overvalued as early as 1996.
They went up for four more years. That was the ultimate pain trade.
The way down was even worse. The Nasdaq 100 Index (NDX) was down 50% in a year. But the bear market still had two more years to go.
When I talk to people about this commodity crash, I tell them that the closest parallel is actually July 2002. Tech stocks went down day after day after day and got to absurd levels. Go back and see where you could have bought AMZN, or MSFT, or EBAY.
If you had the cash.
People started shorting banks and homebuilders as early as 2005. Most of the people I was running around with back then knew there was a bubble.
The top was two years later. Two years of pain.
The bottom was two years after that.
Commodities have been going down for five years now. Long enough?