- MarketWatch.com – Bull market’s 8-year anniversary reminds us that the Dow rewards the bold
Apple has gained nearly 1,000% since 2009
If investors took a leap of faith when the bottom fell out of the market eight years ago and invested heavily in Dow stocks, most would be sitting on a fairly sizeable nest egg today. The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -0.21% is a benchmark of 30 large U.S. companies and generally serves as a barometer of broader market conditions; among investors here and abroad, the blue-chip average is synonymous with the U.S. stock market, period. Since the dark days of March 2009 when the Dow was barely holding onto 6,500 points, the index has soared roughly 200%, mostly on the back of loose monetary policy from the Federal Reserve and other foreign central banks in the wake of the 2008-2009 financial crisis. During the same period, gold only rose 30.8%, while crude oil gained 17.5%.
- Bloomberg Business – A Freakish Calm Surrounds the Eight-Year Bull Market
If the bull market is worried about dying, it’s not letting on. Eight years along and no existential crisis plagues this advance, whose unbroken march from the depths of the Great Recession is the second longest ever. Valuations are stretched and going by its age the rally is in rarefied air. But volatility, the ticker tape of investor anxiety, is nowhere to be found. .. “Investors should now be on the lookout for a fear-of-missing-out mindset that could signal overconfidence and sound the final lap,” said Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at CFRA in New York. “Volatility will remain a potential challenge to the intestinal fortitude of many investors and cause their emotions to become their portfolio’s worst enemy.” At 250 percent, the advance in the S&P 500 Index since 2009 has surpassed any bull market at the eight-year mark, plus all those that ended earlier, according to data compiled by CFRA that goes back to World War II. While history shows stocks tend to get more volatile as rallies drag on, it’s not the case now. In the past 12 months, the S&P 500 has spent only 23 days rising or falling 1 percent, compared with 85 days during the eighth year of the 1990-2000 run. - Bloomberg View – Barry Ritholtz: Obama’s “Radicalism” Didn’t Quite Kill the Dow . . .
We celebrate several market-related anniversaries this week. Perhaps the best known is the market low during the financial crisis, which occurred eight years ago tomorrow. Remember the despair on that day, March 9, 2009, when the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index hit 667 (it’s at about 2,368 now)? Think hard, too, about whether you scoffed when newly elected President Barack Obama just a few days earlier urged investors to buy stocks. Or has your hindsight bias already replaced that week with the memory of a more comforting and self-congratulatory narrative? Maybe you were one of those who nodded in agreement with a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Republican economist Michael Boskin, which also is celebrating an eight-year anniversary this week. The headline, which couldn’t have been more off-base, said it all: “Obama’s Radicalism Is Killing the Dow.” In the meantime, the S&P 500 increased 232 percent from the time Boskin’s op-ed appeared to the day Obama left office.