Well, the Japanese market did worse over thirty years. All this show the defects of passive index investing. Energy is 30 per cent of the TSX, so you would be stupid to stay in energy after oil cratered from $100 to $30. As a retail investor you can be a stock picker, and you can do very well as such. But it requires active involvement in the market. You could also have done much better by passive index investing in the Dow Jones or Nasdaq indexes.