The Stock Market is Doing it Again: 2018 Opens with a Massive Rally

After the stock market boom of 2017, the conventional wisdom on Wall Street was that 2018 would be far more muted.

And once again, the conventional wisdom is getting slaughtered by the market.

It’s easy to understand why people thought 2018 was going to be a lot less impressive than last year. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose by 29 percent last year and the broader S&P 500 rose 22 percent, rare and breath-taking gains that simply cannot be repeated every year. At some point, the stock market will have to cool off or even decline.

That point has not been reached in the first days of 2018. The Dow is up around 4.3 percent since January 2, the S&P is up 4.2 percent. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index is up by more than 5 percent.