Even if you bought the market the day before Lehman collapsed you'd still be up a whopping 130%
Buying on the eve of the Lehman crash would have left an investor underwater even three years later. Before Lehman Brothers collapsed, before AIG buckled, before the financial system fully broke down and was bailed out, stocks were already in a bear market. Bank stocks had hemorrhaged more than half their value over the prior year and a half, and the U.S. was nearly a year into a bruising recession.