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Correction (November 1, 2026): An earlier version of this article said the S&P 500 closed September 2026 at 7,690.96, up roughly 14.6% for the year, citing index data compiled by Trading Economics. The index closed at 7,651.54 on September 30, 2026 against a 2025 year-end close of 6,845.50 -- a gain of 11.8%. The figure and its attribution have been corrected to the S&P 500 daily close series published by S&P Dow Jones Indices and distributed by FRED. 2026 still falls inside the 10%-20% band this article studies, but in the lower part of it rather than the middle. The S&P 500 closed out September 2026 at 7,651.54, up roughly 11.8% for the year, according to the S&P 500 daily close series published by S&P Dow Jones Indices and distributed by FRED, as of September 30, 2026. That figure matters less on its own than what it sets up: the index is entering the fourth quarter, historically the strongest quarter of the year, already up double digits. That is not a new...

Correction November 1, 2026: this article previously attributed to the FOMC statement a phrase calling the move "the official start of a tightening cycle." The September 16, 2026 statement contains no such language and gave no guidance on further moves. The year-to-date gain, given as roughly 13%, was about 12% as of September 29, 2026. Sources: Federal Reserve FOMC statement, September 16, 2026; FRED series SP500. This cycle has a clock on it. The Federal Reserve cut in December 2025, held through the first nine months of 2026, then raised rates on September 16 — and the six previous hiking cycles since 1994 all have a shape that is measured in days and months from that first increase rather than in headlines. What follows walks that clock in order: the nine months before the hike, the hike itself, what day 0 has meant historically, where day 13 sits, the stretch from roughly day 30 to day 105 that the record keeps pointing at, and what the one-year mark has looked like. ...

Correction October 31, 2026: The current episode’s permanent un-inversion date is corrected from August 27, 2024 to September 6, 2024 — after the first crossing on August 27 the spread dipped back to -0.04 on September 3 and -0.02 on September 5, 2024, and only then stayed non-negative — so the 2022-24 inverted stretch runs about 26 months, not 25. The 1978-80 low is corrected from -2.28 to -2.41 points, reached on March 20, 1980. Source: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED), series T10Y2Y, daily. The gap between the 10-year and 2-year Treasury yield has closed at zero or above on every trading day for nearly 25 months now, its last negative close having been September 5, 2024. That "un-inversion" gets far less attention than the inversion that preceded it, but a look at the four comparable episodes since 1978 shows the un-inversion date, not the inversion itself, is the marker analysts have historically watched most closely. This piece lays out when each prior u...

FINRA's own margin statistics, published directly on finra.org, show debit balances in customer margin accounts reached $1,453,832 million — about $1.45 trillion — in August 2026, up 2.6% from July and roughly 37% from a year earlier. That is a nominal record. It is not, by itself, a signal that tells you what happens next. But margin debt has a specific history of spiking hard right before three of the market's worst drawdowns, and looking at what those episodes actually looked like — in dollars, not just percentages — is a more useful exercise than treating today's number as either meaningless or a countdown clock. This article looks back at what followed the 2000, 2007 and 2021 margin-debt peaks. If you hold a margin account now and want the practical side — maintenance calls, sizing and when to cut back — see Using Margin With Debt Near $1.5 Trillion . New York Stock Exchange trading floor (2001, file photo — illustration only, not a current photo of today's t...

Correction October 31, 2026: the headline and opening line were corrected from two prior negative episodes to three. The article itself documents 1990, 2000 and 2009, so the current reading is the fourth, and the 2004 to 2023 positive stretch now notes the 2009 exception. Source: U.S. Treasury daily par yield curve and multpl.com S and P 500 series, as cited at the end of this article. As of the close on Monday, September 21, 2026, the S&P 500 traded at a trailing price-to-earnings ratio of 26.48, according to data compiled by Robert Shiller and S&P and published by multpl.com . Invert that and you get an earnings yield of 3.78%. On the same day, the 10-year U.S. Treasury note yielded 4.96%, confirmed directly from the U.S. Treasury's daily par yield curve rates . All index levels, yields and dollar figures in this article are quoted in U.S. dollars and reflect the composite close of U.S. exchange trading for the S&P 500 index (not any single constituent stock), as rep...

As of September 2026, the Shiller CAPE ratio for the S&P 500 sits at roughly 40.9, according to Robert Shiller's own dataset (Yale University) as compiled by data trackers such as multpl.com and GuruFocus. In about 145 years of monthly data, that level has only been exceeded once: the dot-com peak of December 1999–January 2000, when CAPE hit 44.2. Today's reading is higher than the 1929 peak (32.6) and higher than the December 2021 peak (38.3). That makes this the second-most expensive the U.S. stock market has ever looked by this particular yardstick. Below is what happened after each of the three highest prior CAPE peaks, with the actual numbers instead of a vague "history suggests caution." This article walks through the three highest prior CAPE peaks as case studies. For whether today’s reading predicts a crash and what it means for a long-term portfolio, see Does a CAPE of 41 Mean a Crash Is Coming? The New York Stock Exchange, seen from Federal Hall. P...

Correction October 31, 2026: the 1932 benchmark in the table below was corrected from 37.7% to 37.3% (month-end May 31, 1932); 37.7% is the October 31, 2025 reading that passed it, now shown on its own row. The 2000 figure is labeled as an index-weight share. Source: Morningstar Indexes (CRSP data). The ten largest companies in the S&P 500 now control a bigger share of the index's total value than they did at the height of the Great Depression. That is not a loose comparison — it is what the actual market-capitalization data shows. Whether that matters for your own portfolio depends less on the headline number and more on what happened the last three times concentration reached an extreme like this. History does not repeat on a schedule, but it does leave a paper trail, and that trail is worth reading before assuming the current setup is permanent. The New York Stock Exchange, 18 Broad Street, Manhattan. Photo: Ken Lund, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 ( original file pag...