How low will the Dow go...

Ok as I watch my retirement savings disappear.. and realize that my state pension is going the same way.. I wonder.. how low will the stock market go. So I went to look at some historical pictures.. some of them were uhm interesting in using semilog charts to show this HUGE 'linear log' growth til now... except the log chart does not look really logarithmic when plugging the numbers into a calculator.. instead they look to have been chosen to show a linearish growth.

So I went to look at Yahoo which shows a different picture. From looking at the 'linear' growth from the 1950's.. the stock market went 'non-linear' in the late 1980's and increasingly so in the late 1990's. If I were to take the 1950's growth, the Dow Jones price would 'correct' itself at 3000. If I were to use the better growth in the 1980's.. then the market would correct to 6500. In either case, most of my retirement funding I put away from 1987 til 2009 is vapor. [For it to equal the crash of 1929, it will need to drop to 1531 as that would be 89% of its peak.] Oh well, I never figured I would retire anyway.. figured I would drop dead watching some archaic computer fail its rollover in 2039.

What does this have to do with Free Software... not much, other than it made me realize that I needed to do something to cheer myself up. I am looking now at 4th grade math stuff. Writing a rogue program to do math sounds fun.