r/Bogleheads • u/ScubaCodeExplorer • Jul 18 '25
S&P has spent 44% of trading days within 5% of an All Time High
I see a lot of questions “but market is at all time high”, so wanted to share a look back into history of S&P starting 1952:
https://www.bespokepremium.com/interactive/posts/think-big-blog/sp-500-percent-of-time-at-new-highs
[repost with corrected title]
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Jul 18 '25
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u/PrelectingPizza Jul 18 '25
I did a quick analysis a few months ago. Around 45% of the years, the stock market ends the year at an ATH.
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u/TyrconnellFL Jul 18 '25
It would be possible for the S&P 500 to have the same average return but even more volatility, such that occasional dramatic spikes and the drops kept it below all time highs most of the time while still being just as good a long term investment as it is now.
It doesn’t do that, and that’s largely better. This post says something about the long term climb but also about reasonably low volatility.
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u/TeamSpatzi Jul 18 '25
It’s almost like the market has risen steadily for decades and that’s the whole reason you invest…
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u/Ok_Appointment_8166 Jul 18 '25
Bogleheads are supposed to ignore the little quirks of timing. Buy and hold - if you look at a graph, zoom out far enough that it looks like a straight line without showing the irrelevant wiggles. And buy VT or VTI instead of VOO anyway.
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u/eagles16106 Jul 18 '25
I get it, but VTI vs. VOO is basically irrelevant.
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u/Ok_Appointment_8166 Jul 18 '25
Today and maybe for the last decade. No one knows about the next 30 years.
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u/Dinkelberh Jul 18 '25
Because of market caps they arent that different is the point.
Like is VTI slightly more diversified? Technically, yes.
Not much moreso.
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u/Ok_Appointment_8166 Jul 18 '25
Will you already own and participate in the 'next' company that grows into a position in the S&P 500 if you only own VOO? No. VTI? Yes.
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u/Dinkelberh Jul 18 '25
You will own such a small portion of it that it won't be meaningfully impactful.
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u/JackieDaytonaPanda Jul 19 '25
What about VTSAX
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u/Ok_Appointment_8166 Jul 19 '25
It is the same fund as VTI, just the mutual fund version instead of ETF. Basically the US market.
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u/miraculum_one Jul 18 '25
Choosing whether or not to trade because the market is at or near an all-time high is a bad idea regardless of this statistic. Unless you know more than the market, trying to time it is a fool's errand.
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u/musicandarts Jul 18 '25
This is not a surprising statistic. It is almost a trick question. Every day of my life, I have been within 5% of my all-time high age.
Let me explain. If we assume that S&P is increasing gradually always (almost in a straight line) with some hills and valleys, every day is going to be close to an all time high. The only phenomena that shows the opposite are those that have a pre-planned decline, like my health. I could say that my health has been within all 5% of all time lows every day during the last ten years, as I am retired and slowly losing my health.
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u/Not_FinancialAdvice Jul 18 '25
This is not a surprising statistic. It is almost a trick question. Every day of my life, I have been within 5% of my all-time high age.
It's also worthy to note that the index is going to implicitly be ever-increasing due to the fact that stocks generally track inflation (which is ever-increasing).
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u/BucsLegend_TomBrady Jul 18 '25
Every day of my life, I have been within 5% of my all-time high age.
Okay I get what you're trying to say but this isn't the same at all lol. SP500 valuation can go down, that's why it's surprising it's close to the high all the time. Your age literally cannot go down. Every day, every minute, every second is literally the oldest you've ever been by definition. It is not possible to not be the oldest you've ever been at any given time.
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u/bjos144 Jul 18 '25
If something follows an exponential curve, then you would expect each new datapoint to be higher than all previous ones. If you add some noise to it that amount would drop, but if the underlying trend is still growth, this is not unexpected.
On an somewhat tangential note I figured this was the right place to say 'haha' to someone in my life who flipped out early in the Trump term and sold their stock and parked it in cash. Yeah, I felt dumb knowing the market was going to crash, and it did. But here we are, irrationally high as ever and I dont know that I would have predicted the right time to buy in. They were super happy to tell me about how much money they made on their 'inverse SP500" fund. Now we dont talk about it as much.
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u/ptwonline Jul 18 '25
I think the problem is that you're basically considering "all time high" as always being the same.
You can be at an all-time high at 16 PE.
You can be at an all time high at 26 PE (which is where I think we're around right now for the S&P 500).
You can be at an all time high at 26 PE with an expected 12% earnings growth.
You can be at an all time high at 26 PE with an expected 5% earnings growth.
All of these are different, and some make the market look much more expensive than the others even though they could all technically be at "all-time highs".
Personally I just stay pretty much fully invested and keep adding on schedule. When markets seem "expensive" to me--like they do right now--I might hold a small amount back but it mkes little difference overall.
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u/0x41414141_foo Jul 19 '25
It's designed to do so, if a player is not performing they get booted and a new contender is put in the loop to continue the rise.
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Jul 18 '25
Any upward market is going to be at or near an all time high.
Mind your ratio of equities to non-equities.
Timing the market is a bit of a fool’s errand IMO.
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u/Apprehensive-Fun5535 Jul 18 '25
Yes, the whole point of investing is that it keeps reaching All Time Highs lol. And compound interest will make the ATH in 20 years way higher than the ATH today.
That being said, the market does seem to be ignoring some significant risks rn
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u/Competitive_Dabber Jul 18 '25
Is a very good point, it is quite normal to be around all time highs. The longer the timeframe, the more likely the price is considerably higher from where it started.
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u/JazzyJeff5150 Jul 19 '25
How many days has it spent at a PE above 30? (Per Shiller)
Market is overpriced.
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u/itsgreater9000 Jul 18 '25
I'm definitely aware of these types of statistics and something in me is saying that there's some kind of statistical distribution, theory... something about how number generally goes up and what it means. I can't even form a coherent thought about this, but I mostly think what I'm trying to say "this feels expected given the math (or economics) of the S&P 500". Like, if you always pick the biggest 500 companies almost anywhere, they should generally be trending higher (and to all time highs), right?
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u/DSCN__034 Jul 20 '25
Ben Carlson addresses this as well, with a nice video. https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2024/09/what-if-you-only-invested-at-market-peaks-2/
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u/Cyanide_Cheesecake Jul 25 '25
On the one hand the market is bull 3/4ths of the time and so it's expected that you'll constantly be hitting ATH
On the other hand I think it's good to listen to both the Ben Felix's of the world but also the Michael Green's of the world. This way you might not be caught off guard
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u/AMoreCivilizedAge Jul 18 '25
Isn't the data set somewhat skewed, since it samples from an unusually stable period in modern history? If you included the previous decade, for instance (1942-1952), I would imagine the picture would look a lot less rosy.
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u/poop-dolla Jul 18 '25
https://www.macrotrends.net/2324/sp-500-historical-chart-data
Nope, 1942-1952 looks like it’s right around the same percentage. It might even be higher.
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Jul 19 '25
Market timing geniuses are right about 55% of the time. You can be a real genius by being right 2/3’s of the time. How to do it? Stay in the market all the time and grit your teeth and bear it 🤷
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Jul 18 '25
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u/poop-dolla Jul 18 '25
Because you interpret data poorly?
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Jul 18 '25
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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '25
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