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Welcome back. Today's post answers the message I've now gotten from four different people this week, some version of "the S&P 500 just hit a record high, does this mean it's about to crash?"

What's actually happening

The S&P 500 has closed at a record high more than 27 times in 2026 alone, and it's up roughly 13% year-to-date. A "record high" simply means the index crossed its previous all-time peak, nothing more dramatic than that. It happens more often than the panicked-headline framing makes it sound, and by definition, an index that grows over time is going to keep setting new records as it goes. That's not a red flag. It's closer to the whole point of investing in one.

Record highs are not a warning sign

Here's the part that actually surprised me when I looked at the research. Fidelity's Strategic Advisers team looked at every S&P 500 close going back to 1950 and compared the 12 months following a record high to every other 12-month period in the market's history. The average return following a record high came out to about 12.7%. The average return for all other 12-month stretches: about 12.6%. Essentially identical, if anything, slightly better after a record.

J.P. Morgan's research found something similar looking at data back to 1970: the average forward return after an all-time high was 9.6% over 12 months and 20.2% over 24 months, compared to 9.4% and 18.9% respectively when the market wasn't at a record. Record highs don't happen in isolation, they tend to cluster, because they usually reflect an economy and corporate earnings that are genuinely supportive of growth, not a market running out of room.

The real cost isn't staying in, it's guessing wrong about when to get out

This is the number that actually reframed it for me. Fidelity ran a simple test: $10,000 invested in the S&P 500 from 1988 through 2024, left alone the entire time, grows to just over $500,000. Now take that same $10,000 and pull it out just to miss the market's 5 best days over that 36-year stretch, and the final balance drops by roughly 37%. Miss the 50 best days, and the balance shrinks to under $40,000, less than a tenth of what staying invested the whole time would have gotten you.

What missing the best days actually costs $10,000 invested in the S&P 500, 1988–2024, left alone: grows to just over $500,000.
Same $10,000, but missing the market's 5 best days: down roughly 37%.
Missing the 50 best days: under $40,000 - less than a tenth of the buy-and-hold total.

The catch is that nobody rings a bell announcing the "best days." They tend to show up close to the worst days, in the middle of the exact volatile, scary stretches that make people want to get out in the first place. Trying to dodge the downturn usually means dodging the recovery too, since the two are nearly impossible to tell apart in real time.

That's the actual opportunity cost of trying to time a "better" entry point, not a hypothetical one, a measurable one. The dollar you pull out "just to be safe" has a next-best use too, and while it's sitting out, that use is quietly not compounding.

A record high doesn't mean everything else is fine, and it doesn't need to

J.P. Morgan's research team has made a related point worth sitting with: record highs can and do happen alongside genuinely mixed economic signals, inflation ticking up in places, job growth slowing, pockets of the market running hotter than the broader economy would justify on its own. None of that means the record high is "fake" or that a crash is secretly imminent. It means the market is pricing in a lot of moving pieces at once, the same as it always is. Their framing for holding that uncertainty is to stay invested through it rather than trying to predict the exact moment the mixed signals resolve, being, in their words, "comfortably uncomfortable."

That's a useful way to hold both things at once: the headline can be complicated, and your actual move can stay simple.

What this means if you're just starting out

If you've read the compound interest post on this page, or the $50-at-20-vs-$200-at-30 comparison, you already know the lever that actually matters for someone starting small isn't picking the perfect entry point, it's time in the market and consistency. A record-high headline isn't new information about whether you should have started already. It's just today's version of a headline that's been "scary" at basically every point the market has ever gone up, which, on a long enough timeline, is most of the time.

The thread that connects it all

You didn't miss the window. There isn't one.

The version of you that starts today, headlines and all, is still starting earlier than the version of you that waits for the noise to stop, because the noise doesn't stop. It just changes shape. A record high isn't really a market story, it's an opportunity cost story, same as the textbook and every other small decision covered on this page. What everything really costs you includes what it costs you to wait.

Not financial advice, just what the data says. Talk to a licensed advisor about your own situation, and keep in mind these specific numbers move constantly - they're a snapshot of where things stood when this was written, not a permanent fact about the market.

Sources & further reading