The S&P500’s surge of more than four percent in the last ten trading days is by no means rare. In fact, today’s bull market performance lags the 1996-2000 expansion. Then the S&P500 gained more than four percent in ten days on 152 occasions. These amounted to 14.4 percent of the 1,059 days of that growth period.
So far, the current market has added this much on 126 other ten-day closes, or 12 percent of the time.
Indeed, though the current growth of the S&P500 lags that earlier advance it is much stronger than during the 2003-2007 period. Then it had only 39 such gains, accounting for just three percent of those days.
The NASDAQ’s record is even better – it has added almost five percent since May 1. Further, so far it has recorded such ten-day advances 122 other times since March 2009; these amount to 11.6 percent of all closes.
Putting these ten-day advances in perspective, note that these large gains occurred frequently also during market declines. The S&P500 record shows gains of more than four percent happening near ten percent of the time during both the 2000-2003 and 2007-2009 declines. These bear market frequencies persist also in the DJIA and the NASDAQ.
DJIA .82 percent
NASDAQ .69 percent
S&P500 1.01 percent