My asset class is out of favor, but the performance isn’t bad. When I talk to friends about the stock market these days they look at me sympathetically, like I have a painful skin disease.

“Must be hard for you, covering all that depressing news,” they say.

That’s what I hear: painful. Hard. Depressing.

“Well, it is sometimes depressing, but we’re having a pretty good year,” I respond. “The U.S. stock market is having one of its best years in a long time.”

“You’re kidding,” they invariably say.

No, I’m not kidding. The S&P 500 index is up over 8 percent year-to-date. That is better than most years, in fact it’s the best first seven months of the year performance since 2009. Before that, you had to go back to 2003 to get a better performance.

Source: Yahoo Finance News