Stats › Bear markets and drawdowns › Bull markets
Every bull market since 1928
A bull market is just a name for a stretch where the market goes up a lot. The version used on this page has an actual rule behind it: a rise of 20% or more that follows a decline of 20% or more. That rule matters, because it's the mirror image of the bear market rule, which means the two lists can be set side by side and compared without cheating.
What you get when you do that is the plainest argument for owning equities that I know of. Since 1928 there have been 27 bull markets and 27 bear markets. The bulls are about three times bigger and last about three times longer. That's it. That's the whole engine. This page has the counts, the averages, the two enormous ones that pull the average upward, the strangest entry on the list, and the finding I think is the most useful and the least quoted: bull markets deliver a big chunk of their gains right at the start, while it still feels like the decline is going on.
I built this one as the companion to the bear market page, because looking at either alone gives you a distorted view. Everything here comes from a single source, Ned Davis Research data published by Hartford Funds, and it's linked at the bottom. One source is a limitation and I'd rather say so than dress it up. If you want to lean on these numbers, go read the original.
There have been 27 bull markets since 1928, averaging a gain of 113.9% over 992 days, about two years and eight months. Set against the average bear market's -35.2% over 289 days, the asymmetry is roughly three to one on both size and duration, and it is the entire arithmetic case for staying invested. Bull markets also front load: the first half outperformed the second half in 20 of 27 cases, and the average first month alone returned 13.6%.
Members only
The rest of this page is for members
Below this point there are 9 sections, 2 charts and 1 named source, roughly 1500 words of it. Every figure carries the source it came from and the date the data is from.
You can keep browsing every statistic in the library for free. The intro and the summary are always open.