The United States stock market set a record on Wednesday for the longest bull market in history.
A bull market occurs when the stock market is rising in value while a bear market occurs when stocks are falling. A market is traditionally considered to have turned from a bull to a bear market when the benchmark Standard & Poor's 500 index of major U.S. stocks loses more than 20 percent of its value.
The latest bull run surpasses the last record-breaking bull market of the 1990s that ended in the dot-com collapse in 2000, according to the Associated Press.
Since the bull market began on March 9, 2009, the stock market has made record gains, Fox Business reports. In the wake of the Great Recession, a period during the late 2000s, the S&P 500 hit 676 points when the current bull market began. Today, the S&P 500 is at around 2,830, a 323 percent increase. For the year, it's currently up 7 percent.
The top performing companies in the S&P include GGP, a retail real estate company, and Netflix, a video streaming service.
The S&P isn't the only index that has prospered. The tech-favored Nasdaq Composite has increased with a 611 percent gain. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has grown around 300 percent.
The economy overall has grown steadily since the Great Recession. Unemployment has fallen to 3.9 percent, the lowest since 1969. The economy grew at a 4.1 percent clip last quarter with forecasts predicting a continued growth above 4 percent. Recent growth has at least in part been attributed to tax cuts President Donald Trump signed into law last year, along with deregulation and increased government spending.