When Did the Market Last Look Like This?
Every month since 1976 scored against today on three measures with deep enough history to be worth comparing, then ranked by how closely it matches. For each one, what the S&P 500 actually did over the following year. No forecast — just the record.
Where we are now — May 2026
The comparison month lags the live dashboard because M2 is published monthly with a delay.
The closest historical matches
| Month | Match | 10Y-2Y | CAPE | M2 3m | S&P +3m | +6m | +12m |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| June 1999 | 74.8% | 0.28% | 42.2 | 1.7% | -6.6% | +7% | +6% |
| February 1999 | 71% | 0.12% | 40.4 | 1.82% | +5.1% | +6.6% | +10.3% |
| August 1999 | 69.6% | 0.26% | 41.9 | 1.48% | +5.2% | +3.5% | +14.9% |
| January 2001 | 69.3% | 0.40% | 37.0 | 2.2% | -8.5% | -11.3% | -17.3% |
| January 1999 | 67.1% | 0.11% | 40.6 | 2.21% | +4.3% | +3.8% | +9% |
Sample size: 5 matches out of every month since June 1976. Months within two years of today are excluded — they resemble the present trivially and tell you nothing.
How the match is made
Each month is described by three numbers: 10Y-2Y Treasury spread, Shiller PE, 3-month M2 growth. Each is converted to a z-score across the full history so that a wide-ranging measure does not drown out a narrow one, and months are ranked by their distance from today in that three-dimensional space.
These three were chosen because they are the only inputs with history deep enough to reach past more than one cycle. Real interest rates are deliberately excluded — the TIPS series only begins in 2003, which would cut the comparison off before the dot-com peak.
Forward returns are S&P 500 price changes from the close of the matched month. Each match reports its own outcome rather than an average, because similar setups have produced very different results and averaging that away would hide the only honest lesson here.
Read this carefully
A close match is not a prediction. The most instructive thing on this page is usually how much the outcomes disagree with each other: the same three conditions have been followed by a strong year and by a bad one. If every row pointed the same way, the metric would be worth far more than it is.
What a match does tell you is that today is not unprecedented, and that the periods it resembles are worth reading about. Nothing here is investment advice.