Stock Market's Best 6-Year Run in 25 Years Defied All the Bad News
Despite years of scary headlines, the stock market just logged its strongest multi-year run in over 25 years. Here's why staying invested paid off.
You've heard it a thousand times: "Don't panic, stay the course." Easier said than done when the news cycle feels like a never-ending disaster reel. But the stock market just proved that old advice right in a big way, wrapping up what MarketWatch calls its strongest run in more than 25 years — a stretch that spans roughly six years of relentless wall-of-worry climbing.
There's an old Wall Street saying that bull markets "climb a wall of worry," meaning stocks tend to grind higher even when the headlines are screaming otherwise. The past six years essentially put that idea on steroids. Think about everything investors had to stomach in that window: pandemic shutdowns, inflation spikes, interest rate hikes at a pace not seen in decades, geopolitical conflicts, banking scares, and political turbulence. Any one of those could have been a reason to cash out — and yet, the market kept moving.
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The lesson here isn't that risk doesn't exist. It absolutely does. The lesson is that *exiting* the market to avoid short-term pain almost always means missing the recovery too. Investors who stayed put through the rough patches got to participate in one of the most impressive sustained rallies in a generation. Those who bailed, even with perfectly understandable reasons, likely left serious money on the table.
If there's a practical takeaway for your own portfolio, it's this: time in the market tends to beat timing the market. That's not a new idea, but the last six years gave it one of its most compelling real-world demonstrations yet. The wall of worry turned out to be pretty tall — and the market scaled it anyway.
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