At the precise apex of the dot-com bubble in March 2000, a patient investor who placed ten thousand dollars into the Nasdaq-100 and never wavered would find themselves holding roughly seventy-two thousand dollars today — a testament to time's quiet power over even the most catastrophic of market entries. The journey demanded surviving an eighty-three percent collapse, watching nearly nine dollars of every ten disappear, and waiting fifteen years simply to reclaim the starting line. What ultimately rescued that investor was not the resurrection of the era's fallen giants, but the index's struct