The current bull market has been going strong for nearly a decade, with little sign that anything will rein it in.
Today, though, came one of those rainy days that analysts and advisers hate to see arriving like a late afternoon storm. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped more than 800 points in afternoon trading. And the Standard and Poor’s 500 stock index went down 3%, hitting what is now its longest losing streak in over two years.
Technology stocks were especially hard hit, with Netflix plummeting more than 8% and Amazon down around 6%. Google parent company Alphabet and Apple stock also went down more than 4% today.
This current bull market has had other major corrections, though. That doesn’t mean today isn’t cause for alarm, but it does mean this isn’t the first time in recent years that the Dow and S&P have briefly dipped before rebounding and ticking further upward to new record highs. Here are five of the biggest corrections in this current bull market, now almost a decade long.
Flash Crash of 2010
An early market correction in this run showed up as the so-called Flash Crash of 2010. On June 7 of that year, the market briefly plummeted, and then recovered, all within about an hour.
Black Monday 2011
It took a while for this current bull market to slump to historic levels, but Black Monday 2011 offered another of the current market’s first widely recognized corrections. August 11, 2011 was Wall Street’s worst day since the 2008 recession, according to CNN, with the S&P dropping 6.7%.
Summer Crash 2015
Summer of 2015 was rough again, with the worst Dow average in decades that August. It was the first stock market correction of more than 10% in four years, according to USA Today.
Slow Start Selloff 2016
The early months of 2016 were rough for investors, as the average stock was down 25% in February of that year, according to CNBC. The S&P declined around 14% in 2016 as well.
The Dow’s Biggest One-Day Drop in History
And 2018 hasn’t been without speed bumps either. On February 8, the S&P 500 and Dow fell 10%, which officially put both in market correction territory. It was the first time in two years the index had dipped that low, and set a record for the Dow’s biggest one-day drop in history.
But the market recovered, with the bull market setting records in August—though experts can vary on their opinion of whether this is truly the longest bull market ever. Still, that didn’t stop President Trump from congratulating America on the landmark occasion.
Longest bull run in the history of the stock market, congratulations America!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 22, 2018
