Can the Bull Market Continue?
The Dividend Cafe
The Dividend Cafe - The Bahnsen Group
4.9 • 569 Ratings
🗓️ 27 March 2026
⏱️ 21 minutes
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Summary
Today's Post - https://bahnsen.co/4bzTmf0
David Bahnsen reviews recent market weakness and volatility and asks whether the secular bull market remains structurally intact, arguing the exact start date (2009, 2019, or late 2022) is ultimately semantic. He says bull markets are driven by corporate profits and sentiment rooted in economic reality, and that long-term history trends upward despite periodic recessions, geopolitical shocks, and bear markets. To assess sustainability, he focuses on three factors: labor markets, financial conditions, and corporate profits. He describes “purgatory” data—benign jobless claims but weaker hiring intentions and openings; tightening but not extreme credit conditions; and strong expected profit growth that is also vulnerable to disappointment amid high valuations. He concludes portfolio positioning matters more than predictions, emphasizing dividend growth investing as a defensive approach for both accumulators and retirees.
00:00 Bull Market Check-In
01:30 When Did It Start
04:34 Why Definitions Don’t Matter
05:04 What Ends Bull Markets
10:07 Labor Market Purgatory
12:06 Tightening Financial Conditions
13:35 Corporate Profits Outlook
14:59 Portfolio Takeaways
15:36 Why Dividend Growth Wins
17:53 Final Thoughts and Sign-Off
Links mentioned in this episode: DividendCafe.com
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Dividing Cafe, weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio |
| 0:06.6 | and dividends in your understanding of economic life. |
| 0:10.0 | Hello and welcome to this week's Dividend Cafe. |
| 0:15.1 | I am your host, David Bonson, and today we are going to talk about the state of the bull market. |
| 0:23.6 | We are resisting the temptation again to make everything about what is happening with Iran. |
| 0:28.2 | It goes without saying there are up days, down days, and markets. |
| 0:32.2 | The overall trend for four or five weeks now has been to the downside. |
| 0:35.3 | It has not been that much to the downside, |
| 0:37.8 | but the volatility has indeed been that much, meaning intraday movements. I believe this topic |
| 0:43.8 | of what's going on with the overall, and I mean structural, not this month versus last month |
| 0:50.6 | or this quarter versus next quarter, not cyclical, but a secular state of the market |
| 0:57.2 | in which the overall general trend of both profit growth and market price expansion is to the upside. |
| 1:06.3 | Is that state of market intact? And I do not ask that question in the context of the Iran War, |
| 1:13.6 | but the factors that existed before, during, and after. |
| 1:19.6 | And I do not ask it because I think I have the answer. |
| 1:22.6 | I want to rather look at what the factors are that drive it, what the things are that will end |
| 1:30.2 | up being determinative on the other side of this, and then most importantly, offer up some |
| 1:35.7 | portfolio applications, portfolio conclusions that I think will take a lot of this pressure |
| 1:42.0 | off. Let's first start with a really important question. |
| 1:45.5 | When did this bull market that I'm asking about start? |
| 1:50.1 | I actually would suggest that that question is itself unanswerable and somewhat irrelevant. |
| 1:57.7 | No one should really deny that we're in some form of pretty robust bull market. We've been in for |
... |
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