Stocks: Stock markets haven't risen this much in a 12-month period for a long, long time

In the last 12 months, the US stock market (S&P 500 index) has gone up 70% — a bounce that almost no-one would have predicted during March of last year, when stocks were crashing and the pandemic was just beginning to grind our lives to a halt.

We've gone back over all of the US stock market data we could get our hands on, all the way back to the late 1920s, to get some historical context — and the results are pretty astonishing. Stock markets haven't risen this fast in a 12-month period for literally 85 years. Markets came close in 2009, but the last time US stocks went up this much in 12 months was all the way back in 1936.