Hodlers of those coins was also sure that their coins will recover someday (those are top 10 coins from december 2013)
Omni -90%
Peercoin -80%
Namecoin - 75%
Quark -95%
Bitshares -~100%
Wordcoin -~100%
That's not an argument against holding / long term investing though. That's an argument against trash altcoins. It is easily possible that someone could have day traded any of the coins you listed (or indeed any coin at all) and also lost 80% or more.
If you pick a coin that has a working product and real world use (such as bitcoin or the tiny handful of altcoins that fulfil this criteria), then holding long term is a completely viable strategy.