A Year Removed

It was a year ago this week that the stock markets completely bottomed out: On March 9, 2009, the Dow was at 6,469, while the S&P 500 had arrived at the devil's number: 666. At the time of course, we had no way to know that the markets had reached the bottom. The next day, March 10, the Dow added 500 points, but we'd seen that kind of fickleness before.

Many people suspected that the bottom had been reached several months earlier, in November 2008, when the Dow fell to 7,552 then started heading back up through the end of the year. But it fell back through that floor again in February, then sunk even lower before bottoming out - we now think - in March.

So are we safe to refer to March 9, 2009, as the market bottom? The Dow has risen about 63 percent since then, and the S&P 500 around 70 percent, while we've seen much less volatility than was prevalent in early 2009. With the markets, you should never say never, but it would basically take a depression to bring the markets down to the bottom of a year ago.