A historic bull market is underway. Don’t overthink it.

The article argues that the bull market from 2009 to the present has delivered about 17% average annual returns for the S&P 500 and 13% annually for the S&P/TSX Composite including dividends. It urges investors to stay invested, minimize fees, and avoid market timing, noting that major sell-offs since 2009 have still ultimately rewarded participation. The piece is opinionated and broadly pro-risk assets, but it is commentary rather than a new market-moving event.

Analysis

The key second-order effect here is not simply that equities are rising; it is that prolonged upward drift is suppressing the cost of inaction. In a low-volatility, tape-driven market, underexposure becomes the dominant behavioral mistake because cash drag compounds against investors even when macro headlines look hostile. That creates a durable bid for passive equity exposure, especially among households and retirement assets that are still structurally underallocated to the broad market.

The market’s resilience also changes competitive dynamics inside asset management. Every incremental month of upside widens the performance gap between low-fee beta and high-fee active products, which should continue to siphon flows toward index vehicles and away from concentrated mutual funds. That means the real winners are not just the mega-cap index constituents, but also the ETFs, custodians, and platforms that monetize persistent allocation behavior and recurring contributions.

The main risk is that this thesis is path-dependent: it works until the first prolonged drawdown that lasts long enough to trigger de-risking and forced selling. A 10% correction is routine, but a 20%+ decline after years of conditioned dip-buying would hit positioning harder than fundamentals, because the buyer base has been trained to extrapolate shallow pullbacks. The reversal catalyst is not a single macro shock so much as a regime shift in inflation, rates, or earnings breadth that makes passive compounding look less inevitable.

Contrarianly, the consensus may be underestimating how much of the bull market has already been captured by investors who stayed invested, while overestimating the benefit of trying to time entries from here. The edge is less about discovering a new catalyst and more about maintaining exposure with disciplined sizing, because the statistical penalty for waiting on a cleaner entry is often larger than the penalty for buying too early. In that sense, the market is still rewarding patience, but the opportunity is increasingly in implementation rather than conviction.

Key Decisions for Investors

• Add to core equity beta via VOO or XIU on any 3-5% market pullback over the next 2-6 weeks; use a staged entry to reduce timing risk, since the probability-weighted cost of missing another leg higher remains greater than the cost of a modest drawdown.
• Underweight high-fee active mutual-fund exposure and reallocate to passive ETFs over the next quarter; the risk/reward favors fee compression as a persistent alpha source, with little need to pay for market-like returns.
• Buy 3-6 month call spreads on SPY or ZSP on volatility spikes above recent realized levels; the setup is asymmetric because the market repeatedly rewards dip-buying, while premium paid is capped if the trend persists.
• Favor dividend growers and buyback-heavy large caps over non-cash-return equities for the next 12 months; in a grinding bull market, capital returns provide a downside buffer while still participating in index upside.
• Use a trailing stop only on crowded high-beta names, not on core index exposure; if a larger regime break occurs, beta will de-rate fast, but the higher expected error is in overtrading rather than in holding the base allocation.