I’ve been hearing this sentiment a lot lately. “I don’t want to invest now when the market is at record highs”. Actually, I’ve heard that a lot before too. Do you know why I hear that so often? Because the market is very often at record highs. Let’s look at the last few years:
2013? Record high.
2014? Record high.
2015? Record high.
2016? Record high.
2017? Record high.
2018? Record high.
2019? Record high.
2020? Record high.
If you could go back in time and invest at the 2013 record high, would you? I hope so, because the market is up 139% since then.
To see how the market fares after record highs, I downloaded the historical S&P 500 stock market pricing going back to 1871. Since then we’ve had 298 months where a new record high was broken (About 17% of all months break the record). If you look at just those record high months, then see how the market performed in the following year it wa