Which is why, as the second best alternative, I would hope for something more modest: a volatile market that has periodic downturns, but one that has been bullish for very long periods of time.
stock market movements
This is actually a rough description of what the stock market has been like over the past 25 years, according to the statistics he provided Howard Silverblatt, Senior Index Analyst for S&P Dow Jones Indexes. In that period, the S&P 500 returned 552.31 percent, or 7.8 percent annually, but to get those good returns, an investor had to hold their own through countless recessions.
While August has so far been a negative month for the stock market, there haven’t been any major contractions this year. During the month of July, the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index rose for five straight months. Only seven big tech stocks — Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta (Facebook), Tesla and Alphabet (Google) — accounted for more than two-thirds of the S&P 500’s gains.
This year, through July, the S&P 500 is up 15.9 per cent, bringing total return, including dividends, to 16.9 per cent. Those were great numbers, but the market was rising so quickly on such a tight base that it seemed to me that it was positioning itself to go lower.
What’s more, from the market bottom on Oct. 11, 2022, through July, the S&P 500 index is up 27.9 percent, for a total return of 29.6 percent including dividends. And in June, when the market had risen 20 percent from its October lows, many commenters I declare that the bear market that started on January 3, 2022 has ended and a new bull market has begun.