The Most Boring Bull Market. Ever

In the age of index funds and private companies, even a boom can feel blah.

- Chris Nagi

To the extent anyone on Wall Street cares—and many will tell you they don’t—records in stocks are good for one thing: advertising. Talk all you want about rates of return or piling it up for retirement, but nothing beats a headline about an all-time high for bringing customers in the door.

And in they have come. Cheered by what’s become by some measures the longest bull market on record, U.S. investors have plowed money into U.S. stock exchange-traded funds at a rate of almost $12 billion a month since the start of 2017, five times as much as seven years ago. There are signs of stress—like the recent sell-off in Asia—but so far they appear in U.S. investors’ peripheral vision. Anyone buying stock in an American company right now must be comfortable paying two or three times annual sales per share, a level of shareholder generosity that hasn’t been seen since the dying throes of the dot-com bubble.

When we tell our grandchildren about this bull market, we’ll start by describing its demise, in the crash of 2019, or 2020, or 2025. But we don’t know the end of this story yet. What will we say of the rest? That dips were bought and passive investing ruled, perhaps, and that a handful of tech megacaps—most of them decades old—grew to planetary size. But if the decade is remembered for anything, it could also be as the era when equities returned close to 20 percent a year on average from the March 2009 bottom and the stock market, somehow, got boring.

Which is to say, this isn’t the like the boom of the late 1990s. Rarely do companies have initial public offerings where their stocks double on the first day of trading. The tip-dispensing cabbies of the bubble era are driving Ubers now, and any money they have to invest is going into ETFs, not individual stocks.