Wall Street's Bull Market Celebrates a Milestone

It's 8 years old, but how can it last?
By John Johnson,  Newser Staff
Posted Mar 9, 2017 8:42 AM CST
Bull Market Is 8 Years Old. How Long Can It Last?
The famous bull on Wall Street in Manhattan.   (AP Photo/David Karp, File)

Thursday is a Wall Street milestone: The bull market that began on March 9, 2009, turns 8 years old, making it the second-longest such run in history. (It would need to go another year and a half or so to match the record from 1990 to 2000.) Some coverage:

  • On this day in 2009, the S&P 500 plunged to 676. Since then, it's rallied about 250%. The Wall Street Journal has a funky graphic illustrating the near-historic run here.
  • The Dow closed that same day at 6,547, and if you'd invested $20,000 then, it would be worth $64,000 today, notes the New Yorker. But the post has a warning: "With many investors still upbeat, stock prices could rise further for a time. Eventually, however, overvalued markets do correct and revert to levels justified by economic fundamentals."
  • Reuters, however, suggests a bear is nowhere in sight. "The bull market is going to finish, in our view, when conditions begin to accumulate that tend to lead to a recession," says one analyst. "We just don't see that as a 2017 or 2018 event."

  • What's unusual about the long run is what Bloomberg calls the "freakish calm" surrounding it. There's barely a whiff of volatility or investor anxiety, so much so that there's now a debate underway about whether that's healthy.
  • One consequence of the bull run is that stocks and bonds are now quite expensive by historical standards, according to Money. It runs down that and other factoids here.
  • The top performer in the Dow Jones Industrial Index since 2009? Home Depot, which is up more than 600%. MarketWatch looks at other winners. The star stock in the S&P has been biotech firm Incyte, notes USA Today.
  • There's some debate on when this bull market actually began, and Michael Santoli at CNBC runs through it.
  • Unemployment at the start of the run was 8.3%, and it's now 4.8%, per a list of key stats at Yahoo Finance.
(More bull market stories.)

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