The stock market’s at a record high, but it’s not a bad time to invest

Just like death and taxes, it is a certainty in life that when the stock markets hit an all-time high, the bears come out of hibernation. Stocks are in a bubble, they will say, the market is going to crash. Bears are pessimistic investors, the opposite of bulls. They will say that now is the time to sell our investments.

When the the S&P 500, a stock market index of the biggest US companies, went into freefall in 2022, plunging 27.5 per cent, sceptics thought that it would take years to recover. But already this year it has hit an all-time high on more than 20 occasions.

The naysayers have been proved wrong so far, but they continue to insist that their predictions will play