On Friday, the S&P 500 joined the Nasdaq in officially entering a correction having fallen over 10% from its July 31st high without a 10% rally in the interim. That is the 55th correction since 1952 when the five-day trading week began, and as shown below, it was one of the longer streaks for the index to officially hit that 10% threshold. The median number of trading days across all corrections since 1952 to reach that 10% decline has been 32 days. That puts the current correction at nearly twice as long at 63 trading days. That is the slowest (for lack of a better term) correction since May 2015 and April 2011 when it took 65 and 67 trading days, respectively. However, looking further back, there were much longer periods like 1980 when it took half a year.
As we have noted in the past, the S&P 500 entering correction is not exactly as scary as it may sound with regard to performance going forward. While there is always the chance that a correction will extend further (potentially becoming a bear market), historically, returns have been solid once the index first enters correction. In the chart below, we show the average one and five-year annualized performance of the S&P 500 from the day the S&P 500 first enters correction territory (the day the S&P closes 10% from a high without having a 10% rally in between). As shown, whereas any normal one-year period has seen the S&P average a gain of close to 9%, after the first close down 10% from a high, it has averaged an even stronger 10.6% gain over the following year. As for five-year annualized performance, periods after a correction tend to outperform the norm albeit by a much smaller margin.
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