As retail investors, I'm sure this question comes up more often than not in our minds. We made a particular investment at a bad timing somehow, and we start to wonder how long we will need to recover from this "bad" investment. Do we now hold it for eternity or should we just exit the position and take a loss?

In this article, I'm going to explore these "bad" investments in different asset classes and find an answer to the right duration we should all be looking at to recover from these "bad" investments.

First, let's talk about equities- probably the most common asset class that most of us are investing in. To simplify things, we are not going to talk about individual stocks as I'm sure most of us probably realise that there are always going to be some stocks which will never recover and hence we will probably not arrive at any meaningful conclusion. Instead, we will focus on the index.