Today marks the first anniversary of the stock market bottom

Today marks the anniversary of the March 9, 2009, stock market bottom.

Of course, at the time we didn't know it was the bottom. The market crashed hard in October and November, diving below 8,000 on the Dow. Then it leveled off a bit and it looked like the worst was over. That is, until the second crash occurred, this time in January and February, and the pain didn't stop until the Dow bottomed at 6,547.05, where it closed on March 9 of last year.

Since then, the markets have risen, though we're only 75 percent back to where we were when they peaked in October 2007. That means your portfolio and retirement, unless you radically shook it up, is only 75 percent of the way back, too.

Since the March 9, 2009, bottom, the Dow is up a little more than 60 percent.

The broader S&P 500 is up just less than 70 percent.

And the tech-heavy Nasdaq is up more than 80 percent. March 9, 2009, to March 9, 2010, is the best year for the Nasdaq since the go-go year of 2000.

So what does it all mean?

The steep recovery from March 9, 2009, flattened out in late September. The markets essentially went sideways until the beginning of December, when we got a Santa rally. Bu that ended in mid-January and then we got an actual dip, as the markets returned to their November levels.

Since early February, however, the markets have rebounded a bit and are back to their early-year peaks, their highest levels since September 2008.

However, if you look at the markets since they flattened in late September, you will see that the Dow is up 8 percent, the S&P 500 is up 7 percent and the Nasdaq is up 9 percent.

Those aren't runaway spikes, and there was a lot of volatility since September of last year, but those are levels much closer to what you want to see in a normalizing market.

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