The Bull Market a Decade on ... Running with the Bull

The Bull Market Began 10 Years Ago.

Excerpt:

The financial system had nearly collapsed. The deepest recession in decades was devouring over 700,000 jobs a month. Roughly $13 trillion in stock market wealth, slowly rebuilt since the dot-com bust, had again been incinerated. It was March 2009. And it was one of the best times in a generation to buy stocks. A decade later, the bull market that began back then ranks among the great rallies in stock-market history. The 305 percent surge in the S&P 500 is the index’s second-best run ever. The rise has generated more than $30 trillion in wealth. Adjusted for inflation, that is the most created during any bull run on record, edging out the $25 trillion in gains during the epic streak from December 1987 to March 2000, which ended with the bursting of the dot-com bubble, according to Federal Reserve data.

Mark Haines Calls the Stock Market Bottom, March 10, 2009

Excerpt:

In this clip from the March 10, 2009 edition of CNBC's Squawk on the Street, the late Mark Haines tells Erin Burnett, "I think we're at a bottom. I really do." As the credit crisis continued to swirl, the Dow had closed the day before at 6,547.05, a staggering 54 percent plunge from its all-time closing high above 14,000 in October of 2007.

Mark Haines Calls the Stock Market Bottom, March 10, 2009 from CNBC.

Blog post from 2/20/2009

2/20/2009 is the day I started individual investing. I called a broker and bought 1,000 shares of FITB for just above $ 1,000. I later sold for about $ 10,000.

From there:

• I opened a Wells Trade account enabling me to have 100 free trades a year (I'm grandfathered into this deal ... no longer offered)
• Shortly thereafter we paid our mortgage off and I began to invest $ 2,000 per month 
• After a bit, we were at the point that we lived in one salary and invested the other
• We continue to invest. Recently buying IBM and CSCO