This essay examines how Chinese retail investors make sense of repeated stock market failures across generations. Drawing on ethnographic research, it analyses the recurring discourse of ‘defending the 3,000 points’ on the Shanghai Stock Exchange Index as a generational joke that reflects deeper temporal attachments to the market. I argue that intergenerational memories of loss do not necessarily discourage participation but instead reinforce it, as failures are reframed within the investors’ experience of improvement and narratives of national development. Through this process, disappointment is normalised