Offer your thoughts or opinion on the input financial query or topic using your financial background.

How can you possibly lose on investments in stocks?
For whatever it's worth.  Judging from the comments in the other answers, I think everyone is addressing your question, "How can you possibly lose money,"  there are a lot of ways to possibly lose money in the stock market.  Here are my thoughts.  This is a chart of the S&P 500 from about 1996 to about 2012.  At the top from the first arrow the entire S&P500 index fell about 45%.  From the top of the second arrow the entire S&P500 index fell about 52%.  It is really easy to look at our sustained bull market and feel invincible.  And while I'll concede that not every company in the index fell over these two periods, bear in mind that the S&P500 index is a collection of the 500 largest companies in the United States, and the entire index lost half it's value twice.  As the companies contained in the index shrink in value, they were replaced by companies that are the new biggest 500 in the country, then those fell too, and so on and so forth until the entire index lost half. Value is a funny thing because it isn't necessarily tied to the performance of the business (look at the current rosy valuations of all these non-earnings tech-companies).  It could be that a company is still performing very well but there are just no buyers for the stock.   So, how can you lose money in the stock market?  Very easily.  In A practical sense, it's when you need the money and can no longer weather the storm.  People who went out for retirement around 2000 couldn't sit around and wait until 2007 for their account values to be replenished.  This is why you roll off your stock exposure as you age.  As you get older you don't have time and if you stop having income you can find yourself selling your assets at the least opportune time.