Remember the beginning of 2010? Investors had endured a painful previous 10 years. Indeed, the “aughts” was the worst decade for the stock market since the infamous, Great Depression-plauged 1930s.

Thankfully, the coming 10 years would be markedly different. As is so often the case in the boom and bust cycle, the worst of times were followed immediately thereafter by some of the best. From a market's perspective, the 2010s will forever be remembered as an era of slow but steady gains on Wall Street, and a period of sustained growth for investors and their retirement accounts.

Characterized more by incremental progress than explosive growth, the 10 years from 2010 to 2019 also saw a remarkable lack of volatility, with few setbacks.

Today, the uninterrupted march higher that defined the 2010s is all the more remarkable in the context of history.

Since 1926, there have been 13 bull markets – periods of time where stocks are rising without a 20% decline. On average, they endured for 53 months.

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The current bull market , which began in March 2009, turns 129 months old in December. The next-longest uninterrupted rally began in 1990, and lasted for 113 months. It ended with the bursting of the dot-com bubble.

But why did the current record-setting bull-market occur in the first place? What made the 2010s so notable, and how was the rally sustained?

The Ingredients for a Decade of Growth

Individual stocks don’t always trade for rational prices. Nor do the broader markets. But a decade-long rally doesn’t happen on a whim. The bull market of the 2010s resulted from a special mix of factors:

A depressed base. One meaningful contributor to the decade’s rally was merely the miserable performance of the 2000-2009 period, which helped to drive prices low enough for a solid rally to ensue, should things just return to normal.

In fact, the 2000-2009 decade suffered two separate recessions and accompanying bear markets. The worst, of course, was the disastrous 2008-2009 financial crisis; the S&P 500 fell 57% in 17 months.

Sometimes called “The Lost Decade,” the S&P finished the decade lower than it began – a full 24% lower, in fact. The Dow Jones Industrial Average ended 2009 at 10,428, having lost over 1,000 points over 10 years.

Although in retrospect the market was oversold, there were certainly reasons for the gloom: Entering 2010, the unemployment rate was at 9.9%, levels unseen since the early 1980s.

Many investors were unwilling or unable to risk their money in a market that had ravaged their finances – for an economy that hadn’t even demonstrated consistent GDP growth.

Voila! The table was set for the 2010s to be a great one for the stock market. The 2010s brought a reversion to the mean: not just with returns, but with volatility, company earnings, consumer and investor sentiment, and multiples.

Monetary and fiscal policy. Many experts believe that monetary policy, which is implemented by central banks, was arguably the largest contributor to the melt-up markets of the 2010s. Among them is Anthony Denier, CEO of Webull, a commission-free trading platform.

The past decade’s rally was ignited simply “by cutting interest rates to zero,” Denier says. On top of that, “this was the era of quantitative easing, and the Fed flooded the money supply,” Denier says.

Quantitative easing, or QE, was the Federal Reserve practice of pumping trillions of dollars into the economy through the purchase of assets like bonds. The practice injected $4.5 trillion into the economy between late 2008 and 2014.

Interest rates, which had been at 5.25% in 2007, were cut to zero by late 2008, where they remained until a very slow series of rate hikes began again in 2015.

Throughout the 2010s, rates were never half as high as they were in 2007.

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This not only incentivizes loan growth and investment, but naturally grows investor demand for stocks, says David Spreng, CEO and CIO of Runway Growth Capital.

“When fixed income returns are low, investors look to equities and alternatives,” Spreng says.

So do companies. “The QE fulfilled its purpose, making money cheap, so companies borrowed and invested in themselves,” Denier says. Many companies did this through stock buybacks , while the option to refinance debt also helped boost corporate profits.

Fiscal policy also played a prominent role, as the government attempted to spend its way out of a recession hangover. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama both signed stimulus packages into law, seeking to jump-start growth and boost employment.

More recently, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 provided further fiscal stimulus by cutting taxes, giving individuals and companies more disposable income to invest, spend or save. Especially relevant to the stock market rally: corporate taxes were slashed from 35% to 21%, making companies substantially more profitable overnight.

A measured rally. Importantly, the bull market of the 2010s never seemed to get too far ahead of itself, valuation-wise. If gains remain slow and steady, a 20% decline is harder to come by than in go-go markets driven by speculation.

Despite constituting almost all of the longest bull market ever, the 2010s were only the fourth-best decade for stocks in the last seven. Through mid-November, the S&P’s annualized return in the 2010s was 10.8%. That trails the 1980s (12.6%), 1950s (13.6%) and 1990s (15.3%) by meaningful margins.

To illustrate the comparative severity of the dot-com bubble, for instance, consider the Shiller P/E. A cyclically adjusted price-earnings ratio, it divides stock prices by the inflation-adjusted moving average of yearly earnings over the last 10 years.

Throughout history, the average Shiller P/E of the S&P 500 works out to 16.7. And going back to the 1870s, it’s never reached the wildly inflated level it saw in December 1999: 44.2.

Changing long-term outlooks. Today’s Shiller P/E, while nowhere near dot-com levels, also seems elevated at first glance, at 30.3.

There’s a good argument to be made, however, that this number should be taken in a bit of context. It’s context that’s also helpful in understanding the buoyant equity market of the last decade.

“Technology has created a disinflationary environment through efficiency and virtualization of goods,” says Alan Grujic, founder & CEO of All of Us Financial, a multi-sided investment platform that pays people to trade.

With consumers increasingly getting more bang for their buck, inflation is more difficult to come by.

“Think of all the things inside your iPhone that used to be physical items,” Grujic says, citing cameras and compasses as examples.

This creates an expectation for lower long-term interest rates and drives down bond yields. It also “means that on a time-value-of-money basis, stocks look much cheaper than they do on old-school P/E valuations,” Grujic says.

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On Toward the 2020s

Ten years later, the beleaguered investor of early 2010 is in a much better place. Fidelity’s third quarter analysis of retirement trends found that across over 17 million accounts, average 401(k) balances had grown from $59,100 in 2009 to $105,200 in 2019.

Not everyone has been able to participate in the rally: one in three Americans still has less than $5,000 saved up for retirement.

But for those fortunate enough to participate in the markets, looking back on prior decades is instructive. Few 10-year periods are as smooth as the last one, and investors should stay vigilant, cautious and patient entering the 2020s.

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