The S&P 500's bull run over the past 128 months has been impressive, but it is also not well understood, analysts at LPL Financial note.
The intrigue: While the stock market's gains have continued longer than the previous record bull market that Americans witnessed through the 1990s, it has produced far fewer returns for stock investors.
Details: This bull market's average returns have not been as strong as during the last long run, and they are historically worse than the average bull market, delivering 15.3% average annualized gains compared to the average bull market annualized gain of 18.9%.
- That's been largely because this bull market has experienced two separate 19% corrections in October 2011 and December 2018.
Reality check: "While the selloffs were swift and deep, the S&P 500 didn’t fall more than 20% on a closing basis (the classic definition of a 'bear market')," LPL analysts note.
- "One more bad day last December, though, and we would be saying this bull market is less than a year old. That’s quite a different look than where we are now."
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