Chart of the Week: All-time highs follow all-time highs

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You’ve seen our Chart of the Week before.?

It’s the simplest and most searched-for and shared chart in finance media — the S&P 500 chart, which now shows a record high.

And Yahoo Finance readers have also read versions of this column all week. Because an all-time high is a perfectly fine time to buy stocks. As good as any — and maybe even better.

It’s important to repeat this, and we probably couldn’t write it enough to counterbalance the psychological challenges of investing in an S&P 500 that has literally never been this high.

The natural unease makes sense, even if you remove the outsized role just a few tech stocks have played. The market is in uncharted territory, and it feels like driving at night on an unknown road with the headlights off.?

What if the new territory is uninhabitable? What would S&P 5,000 even feel like? What if there are, like with so many phenomena in nature, unseen maximums and ceilings?

As Creative Planning CEO Peter Mallouk told us Thursday, investors have this psychological idea that what goes up must come down.??

But in reality, the market follows other laws of nature, not gravity.?

The laws that govern the long-term shape of our Chart of the Week are those of growth and productivity. Laws that have so far yielded a truth that says, over time, the population and its activities will increase economic output, grow efficiency, and support investor returns.?

There is a faith in this, no doubt, but it comes with historical backing that shows, at the very least, that just because you can’t imagine it doesn’t mean it can’t happen.?

Which is, the thinking goes, why the S&P 500 largely follows a line, a trend, a gravity of sorts. “Up and to the right,” as they say.?

The simple truth in that even simpler geometry is that this trajectory means experiencing many local and all-time highs over the course of a cycle. After a series of them, they lose their novelty, and investors get more comfortable.?

So perhaps we wish we weren’t afraid to invest back when all-time highs were lower. Or, put another way, we’ve really just experienced so many all-time highs along the way that sometimes we forget what got us here in the first place.

— Ethan Wolff-Mann, Senior Editor at Yahoo Finance