Records Come in Clusters
The S&P 500 daily close, over the last 10 and 30 years. Every session that printed an all-time high intraday is marked in solid ink — a hairline through the chart, a dot on the line, and a tick in the strip below. Records are not sprinkled evenly through time: they arrive in dense runs, separated by droughts that can last years.
- Sessions
- 2,513
- Record highs
- 391
- Share of days
- 15.6%
- Longest drought
- 512 2022-01-04 → 2024-01-19
- Sessions
- 7,548
- Record highs
- 687
- Share of days
- 9.1%
- Longest drought
- 1,834 2000-03-24 → 2007-07-13
A record is counted when the session's high exceeds every high the index has ever printed, measured against its full history back to 1927 — so the first bars of each window are not mislabelled as records just because the window starts there.
Switch the axis to linear and the 30-year chart makes its own argument: on a straight price scale the late-90s bull market flattens into nothing, which is exactly why the log view is the default.