The Lost Decade

Last week we noted the one-year anniversary of the bottoming out of the stock markets. This week brings another anniversary: On Wednesday, it will have been ten years since the Standard & Poor's 500 reached its peak following the bull market of the 1990s.

On March 24, 2000, the S&P closed at 1527, its all-time high at that point, then spent the remainder of the year zigzagging downward in the throes of the high-tech crash. Then 9/11 helped push the index down even further until it closed September 21, 2001, at 965. Things looked better for a bit, until another mini-crash in the summer of 2002 brought the S&P to what looked like its bottom of 800 that September.

Of course, for much of the rest of the decade, the markets looked pretty healthy. The S&P peaked on October 9, 2007, at 1565, an inch ahead of its peak in early 2000 - it had taken seven long years to get back to where it started the decade. But the index would never get any higher, and it would eventually crater at 676 a year ago.

Today, after a year of rallying, the S&P 500 sits at 1145. A decade has brought not the growth investors had come to expect, but a loss of roughly a quarter of the value of the 500 largest companies in America.