Jim Cramer says the bull market's remarkable 4-year run offers a crucial lesson for investors
Four years ago this week, the S&P 500 closed at 3,577. The mood on trading floors was somewhere between shellshocked and resigned. Inflation was running hot, the Fed was about to embark on its most aggressive tightening cycle in decades, and the word "recession" was on everyone's lips. If you'd told an investor then that the index would be flirting with 7,800 by October 2026, a gain of roughly 118%, they might have asked what you were smoking.
Jim Cramer certainly didn't see it coming. And that, he says, is precisely the point.
"The real lesson is that there never seems to be a good time to invest, because bad things do happen quite regularly, and yet investing is a superior way to get a return," the "Mad Money" host said Monday, marking the bull market's fourth anniversary. It's the kind of line that sounds almost too simple, the sort of thing you'd scribble on a napkin. But unpack it and you find the entire philosophical architecture of long-term wealth building staring back at you.
The wall of worry that never quite crumbled
Let's rewind. When the market bottomed in October 2022, the bear market that preceded it had shaved nearly 25% off the S&P 500. Russia had invaded Ukraine earlier that year, sending oil prices soaring. The Fed was jacking rates at a pace not seen since the Volcker era.
Over the next four years, the hits kept coming.
In March 2023, Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in a matter of days, triggering the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history and sparking fears of a broader banking crisis. Then came the debt ceiling standoff, the regional banking contagion, and a brutal stretch in late 2023 that saw the S&P 500 shed more than 10% from its summer highs.
In April 2025, President Trump unveiled what he called "Liberation Day", a sweeping set of tariffs on imports from China, Mexico, and Canada. The S&P 500 plunged 5% in a single session, its worst day since the 2020 pandemic crash. Over the following week, the index lost roughly 13% before staging one of the sharpest intraday reversals since 2008 when Trump announced a 90-day pause.
And then there was the war in Iran, which sent oil prices spiking yet again and had pundits predicting the end of the rally.
Through all of it, the market kept climbing. Not in a straight line, there were corrections, drawdowns, and plenty of moments when selling felt like the only sane move. But the direction was unmistakable.
The AI rocket fuel nobody priced in
Here's where the story gets genuinely interesting. The bull market that began in October 2022 wasn't just a recovery from oversold conditions. It was something rarer: a technological inflection point that most investors, including the professionals, failed to anticipate.
When OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, just weeks after the market bottomed, it lit a fuse that would eventually create trillions of dollars in new market value. Nvidia, which had a market cap of about $750 billion the day before its first-quarter 2024 earnings report, saw its data-center revenue top gaming sales for the first time. The stock would go on to surge roughly 1,875% from the 2022 bottom.
Think about that number for a second. A $10,000 investment in Nvidia at the October 2022 low would be worth nearly $197,505 today. Meta Platforms, meanwhile, climbed 488% over the same stretch, turning the same $10,000 into more than $58,800.
Cramer's own Charitable Trust owns both stocks, so he's not exactly a neutral observer here. But the point he's making isn't about stock picking. It's about what happens when you stay in the game long enough for the unexpected to unfold.
"We could not have predicted either the big declines or the big rebounds," he admitted. "We could've turned tail so many times in these four years. And we would've been all the poorer for it."
The math of staying put
There's a reason Cramer keeps hammering this point, and it's not just motivational speaking. The data backs him up.
Research from Hartford Funds shows that bull markets last, on average, about 2.7 years with a gain of roughly 115%. Bear markets, by contrast, average a loss of 35% and typically wrap up in under a year. But averages can be misleading. Since 1926, the average bull market has actually lasted closer to 6.6 years, with a cumulative return north of 300%.
The current cycle's 117% gain through year four ranks among the stronger performances in history. Of the six prior S&P 500 bull markets that reached the four-year mark, five continued higher in their fifth year. The average fifth-year return? A tidy 13.5%.
None of this guarantees anything, of course. Past performance is the oldest disclaimer in the book. But it does suggest that the instinct to bail after a "good run" is often the most expensive instinct an investor can have.
The real cost of trying to time the market isn't just missing the upside. It's missing the handful of days that account for most of the gains. Historically, the best trading days cluster around periods of maximum pessimism, exactly when sitting tight feels hardest.
What the professionals worry about now
None of this means the next four years will look anything like the last four. There are legitimate concerns swirling around this market, and pretending otherwise would be intellectually dishonest.
The most obvious is valuation. The S&P 500's forward price-to-earnings ratio sits at about 19.4, down from 22 at the start of 2026 but still above the long-run average. Nvidia alone trades at roughly 24 times forward earnings, and it's not the only mega-cap carrying a premium multiple.
Then there's concentration. The top 10 S&P 500 stocks, nearly all of them tech-related, now account for a historically large share of the index. Three companies alone make up 21% of the S&P 500, the most ever. That kind of concentration cuts both ways. It's driven spectacular returns, but it also means the index is more vulnerable to a handful of earnings disappointments.
Cramer himself has flagged concerns about the AI trade getting overheated. In May, he warned that 2026 "isn't 1999, it's worse," pointing to the fact that just five AI stocks were driving more than half the S&P 500's gains. He's also cautioned against buying more semiconductor stocks until they show signs of bottoming.
And yet, his core message hasn't wavered. Stay invested. Keep buying. Don't let the noise shake you out of positions that are working over the long haul.
The psychological trap
Here's the thing about market timing that nobody likes to admit: it feels smart. It feels disciplined. When headlines are screaming about tariffs or war or inflation, selling and waiting for "clarity" seems like the responsible thing to do.
But clarity never comes. Or rather, it comes too late to be useful. By the time the coast looks clear, the market has already rallied. The recovery is always obvious in hindsight.
Behavioral economists have a term for this: loss aversion. We feel the pain of losses roughly twice as intensely as we feel the pleasure of equivalent gains. That asymmetry makes us want to act during downturns, to "do something", even when doing nothing is the statistically superior choice.
Dollar-cost averaging helps mitigate this impulse. Investing a fixed amount at regular intervals forces you to buy more shares when prices are low and fewer when they're high, smoothing out the emotional roller coaster. Lump-sum investing has historically outperformed dollar-cost averaging about two-thirds of the time, but that's cold comfort if you panic-sell at the bottom.
The best strategy is the one you can actually stick with through a 20% drawdown without losing sleep. For most people, that means automating contributions and then ignoring the headlines.
The five-year question
So where does this leave us? The bull market just turned four. Historically, that's not a particularly old age. Carson Group's Ryan Dietrick points out that the average bull market lasts about eight years, and of the five major bull markets since the 1970s that reached their fourth year, all made it to a fifth.
But the composition of this rally is unusual. It's been fueled by an AI investment boom that Goldman Sachs estimates will top $1 trillion in new cash this year and could reach $7 trillion globally by the end of the decade. That's not a speculative bubble in the dot-com sense, the companies driving these gains are profitable, cash-generating behemoths, not startups burning venture capital.
Still, trees don't grow to the sky. At some point, the pace of AI spending will moderate. Earnings will need to catch up to valuations. And the market will likely endure another correction, maybe even a bear market, before this cycle is done.
Cramer's point isn't that investors should be blind to those risks. It's that they shouldn't let those risks paralyze them. The four-year run that just concluded is a reminder that the biggest enemy of long-term returns isn't volatility. It's the human tendency to flinch.
What the last four years actually taught us
Let's tally it up. In four years, the S&P 500 weathered:
- The fastest Fed tightening cycle since the early 1980s
- The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank
- A tariff shock that briefly sent the index down 13%
- A war in Iran that spiked oil prices
- Persistent inflation that refused to cooperate
- Endless predictions of recession that never materialized
And through all of it, the market delivered a cumulative return of roughly 118%.
That's not a story about genius stock picking or perfect timing. It's a story about what happens when you let compounding do its work. The investors who fared best over the last four years weren't the ones who predicted the 2023 banking crisis or the 2025 tariff tantrum. They were the ones who didn't sell.
"We could've turned tail so many times," Cramer said. "And we would've been all the poorer for it."
Four years from now, when this bull market, or whatever comes next, has written its next chapter, the same lesson will likely apply. There will be reasons to sell. There always are.
The question is whether you'll listen to them.