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The S&P 500 is up nearly 80% over the past three years.
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Double-digit winning streaks are surprisingly rare in the stock market.
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There is some concern about an AI bubble heading into 2026.
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10 Stocks We Like More Than the S&P 500 ›
The S&P 500 (SNPINDEX: ^GSPC) is set to close out another banner year.
Through December 15, the broad market index is up 16%, and barring an unexpected crash, the index looks set to end the year with another double-digit gain.
That would mark the third consecutive year the stock market has risen by double digits, following gains of 24.2% in 2023 and 23.3% in 2024. The S&P 500 is now up 77.5% since the end of 2022.
Racking up three consecutive years of double-digit earnings isn’t as common as you might think. After all, barring 2022, the stock market has essentially been in a bear market for 16 years now, but that’s not the historical norm.
It is only the third time since 1952 that the S&P 500 has gained 10% or more in three consecutive years. The other times were 1995-1999, when it did so for five consecutive years during the dot-com boom; 2012-2014, the mid-2010s bull market, and 2019-2021, which included the stock market boom of the Covid era.
The tables below show the results for each of these periods.
|
Year |
I win the S&P 500 |
|---|---|
|
1995 |
34.1% |
|
1996 |
20.3% |
|
1997 |
31% |
|
1998 |
26.7% |
|
1999 |
19.5% |
|
Total |
219.9% |
|
Year |
I win the S&P 500 |
|---|---|
|
2012 |
13.4% |
|
2013 |
29.6% |
|
2014 |
11.4% |
|
Total |
63.7% |
|
Year |
I win the S&P 500 |
|---|---|
|
2019 |
28.9% |
|
2020 |
16.3% |
|
2021 |
26.9% |
|
Total |
90.2% |
These are some of the best three-year performances in modern stock market history, but what happened after that?
Well, we know what happened in the fourth year of the dot-com boom. Stocks continued to rise.
In the two most recent series, investors were not as lucky. In 2015, the stock fell just a hair, down 0.7%, and 2022 was the tech bear market that most investors probably remember. The S&P 500 lost 19.4% that year.
So, two of the three times the S&P 500 has put together three consecutive years of double-digit gains, it has declined the following year, though not until 2015.
However, the market’s performance during the dot-com boom seems informative. After all, many investors see parallels between the current AI boom and the dot-com boom of the 1990s.
The explosion around AI has been the main driver of stock market growth for the past three years, which started shortly after OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022. Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) has grown roughly 10x to a market cap of nearly $5 trillion because of AI, and the rest of the “Magnificent Seven” have also grown, largely because of the excitement around AI.