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Sure didn't help that 2018 ended with everything being down 15-20%, this year was more of a rebound than a continuous healthy market.

Thank you! This is such an obvious point and yet it's hardly ever mentioned.

It may seem intuitive, but it's actually entirely arbitrary to pick 12/31/2018 through 12/31/2019 as the time period for a returns analysis.

>> "...it's actually entirely arbitrary..."

This is one good objection to the article.

Another objection is that they have spun "central bank inflates financial asset bubble which is correlated across all asset classes" as a good thing.

And it seems to have never crossed the credulous author's mind that asset classes with correlated gains also have correlated losses.

Even by the NYT's extremely-naive standards of thinking critically about financial markets, this is a weak effort.

Not just ended with every down, but made a significant fraction of that drop happening on a single day (Dec 24th).

It was a good day to do tax loss harvesting...