With the S&P 500 notching another all-time high today, it means the bull market that began on October 12th, 2022 has once again been confirmed. Check out our well-known table below that shows historical bull and bear markets for the S&P.

What's significant here? For starters, it may be hard to believe, but the current bull has gone on for basically as long as the post-COVID bull market that ran from March 2020 to January 2022. The current bull is now at 637 calendar days in length compared to the post-COVID bull that ended up lasting 651 days.

While the current bull and the post-COVID bull are now similar in length, this bull has only seen a gain of 57.5% compared to a gain of 114.4% for the post-COVID bull.

At 57.5%, the current bull is still about 20 percentage points below the median bull market gain of 76.7%, and it's about half the average bull market gain of 114.4%. 

Below is a log chart of the S&P 500 since its inception in 1928 with bull markets shaded in green and bear markets shaded in red. The shading does a good job of highlighting how much longer bull markets typically last than bear markets. 

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