Six Years, One Wall of Worry: Anatomy of the Strongest Run Since the Late 1990s

The equity advance of the past six years now ranks as the strongest sustained run in more than 25 years, achieved against a backdrop that would, on paper, have justified persistent de-risking: a global pandemic, a supply-shock inflation spike, the most aggressive rate-tightening cycle since the early 1980s, regional banking stress and repeated geopolitical escalation. The durable lesson for allocators is the asymmetric penalty attached to exiting: each drawdown that appeared to validate caution was recovered faster than consensus expected, and the compounding forgone by sitting out proved harder to recoup than the volatility avoided. That has fed steady flows into low-cost core and factor vehicles, with active core products and multifactor strategies drawing renewed interest as investors seek participation with valuation discipline, and dividend-growth vehicles remaining the default for long-horizon income compounding. Corporate detail continued to reflect the same bifurcated regime: Wolfe Research flagged upside in electrical equipment names after a strong quarter, while insider selling at Artivion and Silicon Labs and a downgrade of Inter Parfums on earnings concerns illustrate that broad index strength is masking widening single-name divergence.