Wednesday, December 22, 2010

An Early Christmas Present

The stock market offered up an early gift yesterday, with the S&P 500 climbing past the 1250 mark for the first time since September 12, 2008. Why is that date significant? Because that was the final trading day before Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, sending the financial world into a tailspin.

Equities dropped like a rock through the remainder of that September, eventually hitting bottom on March 9, 2009, when the S&P 500 closed at 676. That marked a 12-year low for the index. But it's been pretty smooth sailing ever since.

Now that we've gotten back to the post-Lehman high, the next S&P 500 watershed would be reaching 1565. That's the index's all-time high, achieved in October 2007. You'll remember that as the month before the Great Recession officially began.

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