US stocks continue to gain; US500 1 day from record

Summary:

• US indices in the green once more today

• US500 and US100 around 1% from record highs; US30 3%

• Tomorrow will mark the longest bull market ever for the US500

Indices across the pond are once more trading higher ahead of their cash open with the markets building on recent gains and aided by a nice rally this morning in Europe. The US500 and US100 have been the best performing of late with the US30 lagging behind a little. This can be seen by both the US500 and and US100 currently residing around 1% from their all-time highs, whereas the US30 is a little more than 3% from its record peak.   

US indices are back near their record highs set earlier this year, but there has been a notable divergence in recent months with the US30 lagging behind both the US500 and US100. Source: xStation

The US500 is a day away from a major milestone. Wednesday would mark the longest bull market ever for the index, stretching 3,453 days since hitting a bottom in March 2009. According to a loose consensus, bull markets are rallies that go beyond 20 percent and are never interrupted by a 20 percent fall. Several objections pertain to measurement. One is how to date the rally this one supposedly supplants -- the dot-com bubble. Traditionally, statisticians have placed the start of the tech rally in October 1990, the bottom of a slide in the S&P 500 that got very close to 20 percent but not all the way. If you refuse to call that 19.92 percent drop a 20 percent drop, the advance gets longer, and today’s would need a thousand more days to exceed it.

A decline of 19.92% has stopped Wall Street calling the advance from 1987 to 2000 as the longest ever. The rounding error to 20% was seen as having ended the bull market and the run to the 2000 high is often remembered as beginning in October 1990. Due to this, the current bull market from March 2009 is set to overtake it as the longest ever - barring a highly improbable drop of 20% before tomorrow’s close. Source: Bloomberg

Another point of contention can be when to start counting the bull market. If it is taken from the March 9, 2009 low then it has been 9 years, 5 months and 12 days. But some say that the market needs to breach a previous high. If viewed in this light then one could say the latest bull market started on February 19th 2013, when the US500 surpassed the peak from October 2007.

If we take the start of the bull market from when the market made an interval recovery, such as taken out the previous peak then the current one appears far shorter. It wasn’t until February 19th 2013 that the market moved above its previous peak from October 2017. Source: Bloomberg