Good day,
Thank you for subscribing to the Earnings360 newsletter, your daily source for quarterly earnings news and updates.
Each morning edition contains a wrap-up of today's pre-market earnings announcements and yesterday's earnings announcements after the closing bell.
Before we send you your first edition, please take a moment to confirm your subscription below. We will not be able to send your newsletter until you confirm your subscription.
Confirm Your Subscription Here
The Earnings360 Team
Just For You Happy Third Birthday to the Bull MarketWritten by Jordan Chussler. Published 10/18/2025. 
Key Points - The bull market just turned three years old, and there are rising concerns about historically high valuations and an emerging AI Bubble.
- The average bull market lasts 2.7 years, meaning this current run could be, by historical standards, entering its latter stages.
- Looking at three high-beta tech stocks can provide clues about the risks of unbridled enthusiasm.
As economists and pundits continue debating whether stocks are in an AI bubble, the current bull market just turned three years old. October 14, 2022, marked the bottom of the last bear market, which lasted around nine months. By its end, the Dow dropped 20%, the S&P 500 was 25% lower, and the NASDAQ was down 36%. Since then, it's been a different story: the major indices have gained 60%, 85%, and 118%, respectively. Your $200 MarketBeat account credit expires in less than twelve hours. Upgrade to MarketBeat All Access today and save $200 on your 2025-2026 MarketBeat premium subscription. Claim My Discount But how much more can investors expect amid historically high valuations, rising market concentration, and soaring AI investments? Examining past bull market cycles and the behavior of three high-volatility tech stocks can help shed light. At 3 Years Old, This Bull Market's Long in the Tooth According to Hartford Funds, bull markets last, on average, 2.7 years with an average gain of 115%. By comparison, bear markets average a loss of 35% and typically last less than a year. There are, of course, anomalies. Before the dot-com bubble burst, the preceding bull market lasted 12 years. By contrast, the run that ended with the COVID-19 crash gave investors only about a year of gains from March 2009 until March 2020. Since 1928, there have been 27 bull markets. During those cycles, the first half of a bull market has outperformed the second half 74% of the time (20 out of 27). So even if this current run isn't ready to yield to a bear market, statistically the pace of gains could be slowing. What sets this bull market apart from many others is that it's been propelled by an AI frenzy, which invites comparisons to the dot-com era. A Tale of Two Bubbles On Dec. 5, 1996, then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan warned the market was in a state of "irrational exuberance." Yet it took more than three years for that bubble to burst in March 2000. While today's AI-fueled rally shows some parallels — including exuberance — there are important differences. The companies driving the biggest gains today — many of which are Magnificent Seven members — aren't the speculative startups that inflated the dot‑com bubble. They are well-established mega-cap firms with histories of positive earnings growth and reliable revenue. They are also serial acquirers that fortify competitive moats and fend off emerging competitors through mergers and acquisitions. According to Callie Cox, chief market strategist at Ritholtz Wealth Management, that has helped differentiate this cycle from the one that ended in the dot‑com collapse. The current bull has "moved higher on the backs of just a few stocks, with the usual suspects — like small caps — lagging for much of the past few years," Cox wrote in her newsletter. "There's a graveyard of people who have tried to call for the end of this bull, yet it just keeps pushing forward." Markets are cyclical: what goes up can come down before eventually moving higher again. To better understand the risks investors face late in a cycle, it helps to look at three AI-leveraged names and their volatility. Here's what Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA), NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA), and Palantir (NASDAQ: PLTR) can tell us about late‑cycle bull market investing. Clues From 3 High-Volatility Mega-Cap Stocks As the world's second-largest EV maker, Tesla doesn't immediately evoke AI. But the company is embracing the technology for autonomous driving systems and for its Optimus humanoid robot program. The stock is notoriously volatile: from its all-time high (ATH) on Dec. 17, 2024, to its year-to-date (YTD) low on April 8, 2025, TSLA fell nearly 54%. Since that low it has rebounded about 93%. That price action helps explain its beta of 2.09, meaning Tesla is roughly twice as volatile as the market. In short, Tesla bulls should be cautious, especially if the broader market begins to slip. From its then-ATH on Nov. 8, 2024, to its YTD low on April 4, 2025, NVIDIA dropped about 36%. Since that trough it has climbed roughly 93% and set a new ATH in October. The semiconductor giant — which has arguably contributed more than any other stock to the AI-fueled rally — has a beta of 2.12 and is already showing signs of weakness relative to some competitors. Palantir, the AI darling of 2025, has the highest beta of the three at 2.60. This year it has experienced several sharp peak-to-trough moves — declines of about 10%, 38%, and 11% — while falling out of favor with some institutional investors. Given lofty valuations relative to earnings, TSLA, NVDA, and PLTR currently have forward P/E ratios of about 189.34, 28.03, and 215.14, respectively, compared with the S&P 500's forward P/E near 28. On its third birthday, this bull market could have room to run — bubbles often take time to expand before they burst. But for investors with large positions in the market's most volatile names, periodic rebalancing and attention to risk make sense. Just ask shareholders who owned Yahoo in early 2000.
| 
