S&P 500 outran every doom narrative: VOO up 34% in 22 months
As seen on the 24/7 Wall St. homepage on September 23, 2026.
Bloomberg's ETF analyst is putting a number on the cost of trading the doom headlines: 34% in 22 months for anyone who just held the S&P 500 index fund through AI bubble talk and Fed hikes.
COYOTE VS SPX: Wrote today about how this market is so akin to the Road Runner cartoon, as the S&P 500 cheerfully eludes each new alarmist narrative thrown at it by the Doomers w/ AI Fears and Fed Hikes being the latest attempts over the past 22mos which has seen $VOO gain 34%. https://t.co/lTfpbZwldr
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Eric Balchunas, Bloomberg's senior ETF analyst, published a piece framing the S&P 500's recent run through the lens of the Road Runner cartoon, with the index playing the nimble bird and a rotating cast of bearish narratives playing Wile E. Coyote. The central observation is that each new alarm, no matter how loudly it was amplified, failed to derail the index.
The two most recent attempts he names are AI bubble fears and Fed rate hikes. Both were treated by many investors as reasons to reduce equity exposure, and both produced the same result: the index kept moving. Over the 22-month window Balchunas cites, the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF gained 34%.
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That 34% figure is the cost of sitting out. An investor who rotated to cash or defensive assets each time a doomer narrative gained traction would have watched that gain pass by untouched.
Balchunas is not predicting that every future bearish call will be wrong, and nothing in his post makes that claim. What the 22-month record does show is that the burden of proof for abandoning a broad index position has historically been high, and that alarmist headlines have repeatedly failed to clear it.
Mentioned: VOO