Long Island stocks, S&P 500 fared well in history-making U.S. bull market

The record-setting bull market in U.S. stocks is now nine years, five months and 13 days old, a period that also saw strong gains by Long Island stocks.

The current bull run on Wall Street became the longest in history on Wednesday. The benchmark S&P 500 index of major U.S. stocks has gone 3,453 days without a drop of 20 percent or more, the traditional definition of a bear market.

Both the S&P 500 and the Newsday Long Island Index, which includes 30 stocks of companies headquartered in Nassau or Suffolk county, hit a low point on March 9, 2009, as the country struggled to emerge from the most severe recession since the Great Depression.

The S&P 500 index finished Wednesday with a loss of 1.14 points, or 0.04 percent, at 2,861.82. Since the low point in 2009 it has gained about 320 percent.

The Dow Jones industrial average slid 88.69 points Wednesday, or 0.3 percent, to 25,733.60. The Nasdaq composite gained 29.92 points, or 0.4 percent, to 7,889.10.

The LI index closed Wednesday at 373.05, an all-time high and a 291 percent increase from its March 2009 nadir. (Unlike the S&P 500, the LI index was not in a bull market the entire stretch because it fell 25 percent from May to October 2011. The S&P 500 fell just under 20 percent in that time.)

Despite its long duration, this bull market actually wasn't as big in terms of overall gains as the 1990s one that ended with the collapse of the dot-com boom. The S&P 500 rose 417 percent in that period.

Of the companies in the LI index since 2009, shares of Great Neck-based real estate investor One Liberty Properties advanced the most: up 2,074 percent, including dividends. OLP’s portfolio of industrial, retail and restaurant properties served its shareholders well during the economic recovery.

Melville security software maker Verint Systems was second with a gain of 1,088 percent.

Not every Long Island company was buoyed by the bull: Port Washington drugmaker Aceto, hit hard this year by falling generic drug prices, is down 18 percent since March 9, 2009 — the only company in the index with a stock-price decline since the bull market began.

Like the S&P 500 index, the LI index has seen turnover in the nine years since the bull market began. Only 19 of the 30 companies in the LI index on March 9, 2009, are still in the index today. Companies were replaced when they left Long Island or were bought by other companies.

For example, Arrow Electronics, Long Island’s biggest public company by revenue in 2009, moved its headquarters to Colorado in 2011. CA Technologies, known as Computer Associates in 2009, moved its headquarters from Islandia to Manhattan in 2014.

Pall Corp., a Port Washington filtration systems maker, was bought by Washington, D.C.-based conglomerate Danaher Corp. in 2015 for $13.8 billion, and Cablevision Systems was bought by European telecom giant Altice N.V for $17.7 billion in 2016.

As these companies left the index, other growing companies replaced them, such as Jericho bank company Esquire Financial Holdings, Lynbrook biopharmaceuticals maker BioSpecifics Technologies and Amityville alarm-systems maker Napco Security Technologies. -- With AP