Six Years of Bull Market for US Stock

Six Years of Bull Market for US Stock – This past Friday marked the six-year anniversary of the bottom in US stock market as represented by the popular S&P500 and DJIA indexes. It is surprising when we realize how far they’ve come since Friday, March 6th, 2009. That day, which just like yesterday, was a jobs report day (NFP), saw a low of 666 in S&P500 and 6470 in DJIA. These were the lowest points in those two indexes since September 1996 and April 1997 respectively. Compare that with yesterday’s closing levels of 2072 for S&P500 and 17856 for DJIA, a rise of more than 200% for the former and more than 170% for the latter.

Another gauge of how different things are six years later is the nonfarm jobs report. Employers cut 650k jobs in February 2009, after another cut of 655k in January. The unemployment rate rose to 8.1% in February from 7.6% in January. All these numbers painted indeed a bleak picture. Six years later, things are completely different though: 295k jobs were created in February 2015, coming on top of another gain of 252k in January. The unemployment rate is 5.5%, down from 5.7% in January.