A look at 150 years of the $SPX - Bull Markets and Crashes

“This is the longest bull market in history!”

That’s just not the case

Let’s take a walk back in time….

Link to Blog Post

This chart represents Present Day $SPX all the way back to 1872

This only represents about 150 years of US Markets history

From a headline perspective the longest bull market in history sounds tempting to use

There are some agreed upon norms for what we consider a bull market, bear market, recession, depression or crash

They are all fairly arbitrary

For example the 2018 meltdown that dropped 19.9% doesn’t count as a bear market, because it would’ve had to be down 20% for it to be an official bear market

Investopedia has this to say about what a bull market is…

There is no specific and universal metric used to identify a bull market. Nonetheless, perhaps the most common definition of a bull market is a situation in which stock prices rise by 20%, usually after a drop of 20% and before a second 20% decline

You can see where the logic is a bit off there, just .1% and we’d currently be about 11+ months into a bull market

The NASDAQ went above 5000 in the year 2000 it didn’t actually go higher than 5000 again for another 2016 which would make this NASDAQ bull market 3 years old if it hadn’t dropped below 23% in the 2018 meltdown

Where $SPX was only down 19.9% (still a bull market)

NASDAQ was down 23% (bear market)

Making the NASDAQ current bull market nearly 12 months old


My version of a bull market is:

A higher high above the last market top commences the bull market

NOT the very bottom of the pits of hell, like March 2009 which is what most people are looking at

So the current bull market in $SPX began until Jan 2013 is only 6 years old

Unless you consider the 19.9% selloff to actually be a bear market then we are in a new bull market that is about 12 months old

Either way 6 years or 1 year is not a historically long bull market



Examples of bull markets in long swaths of expansion

1925-1929 (4 years)
1954-1973 (19 years)
1982-2000 (18 years)

Paying attention to the bigger picture of when we are stagnant, declining or expanding seems to be a lot better target to focus on

Overall the shift from Military Industrial Complex V1 (1797-1941) to Military Industrial Complex V2 (1944-Present) was a substantially powerful move for the US Economy

The question I have is are we sunsetting V2?

And if so, is what is V3?

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