Today Marks Two Years After Dow, S&P 500 Highs: Where Are We Now?
Today marks the two-year anniversary of the historic highs for the Dow and the S&P 500. Let’s take a look at where we were and where we are now. On Oct. 9, 2007, the Dow Jones Industrial Index of 30 blue-chip stocks peaked at 14164. The broader S&P 500 peaked at 1565. (The tech-heavy Nasdaq hit its 2007 peak of 2859 a couple of weeks later, but its historic high came just before the dot-com crash in early 2000.) So that’s where we were. Where are we now? The Dow closed today at 9864, 31 percent off its historic high. The S&P 500 closed today at 1071, 32 percent off its historic high. So that means it’s taken us two full years to get back a little more than two-thirds of what was in our 401(k) accounts in October 2007. But things are looking better than they did when the markets hit their most recent bottom on March 9 (Dow: 6,547; S&P 500: 676.) And, if you kept your retirement money in stocks as the market tanked, think about it this way: you were buying a lot more stock on the cheap.
