The bull market, born out of the pandemic, has turned a year old. The remarkable turnaround has some analysts wondering if the breakneck pace is sustainable.<\/p>\n
Source: Refinitiv<\/p>\n
The New York Times<\/p>\n
By <\/span>Matt Phillips<\/span><\/p>\n The bull market turned a year old on Tuesday, a testament to the unbridled enthusiasm that let investors shrug off the economic carnage of the pandemic and buy stocks \u2014 and pretty much anything else.<\/p>\n Since the S&P 500 scraped bottom on March 23 last year, the blue-chip index has posted a rally of nearly 75 percent, even with a 0.8 percent fall on Tuesday. Tesla\u2019s stock is up more than 650 percent, while true believers have pushed up shares of GameStop by over 4,500 percent. Bitcoin is booming, and so are even more esoteric assets like NFTs.<\/p>\n It\u2019s enough to pose a question that would have seemed unfathomable a year ago.<\/p>\n \u201cIs this a bubble?\u201d said Garry Evans, chief strategist for global asset allocation at BCA Research. \u201cI would say there are certainly pockets of the market that look bubbly.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Evans said he didn\u2019t see \u201ca generalized bubble\u201d but believed that individual stocks \u2014 like GameStop, which was driven up in January by retail traders gathering on sites like Reddit \u2014 and cryptocurrencies were overvalued.<\/p>\n \u201cThose are definitely individual bubbles,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Few on Wall Street will ever predict a broad-based bubble, the overenthusiastic rise of prices that can be ruinous to investors when they burst. So it\u2019s remarkable that the b-word is on anyone\u2019s lips when you consider the outlook a year ago. The stock market had plunged nearly 34 percent and finally bottomed out on March 23, 2020.<\/p>\n The sell-off stopped only after the Federal Reserve took steps to cut interest rates almost to zero and restarted bond-buying programs that bought trillions of dollars in government-backed debt to get money flowing through financial markets. Stocks began climbing again, and accelerated as the government provided aid including expanded unemployment benefits and three rounds of direct stimulus payments worth as much as $3,200 a person.<\/p>\n