One of its members was Thomas Jefferson, a lawyer from Virginia. He had been a leader in Virginia, and Virginia had elected him to the Continental Congress. The others on the committee were too busy with the revolution to work on the declaration, so Jefferson wrote it alone. He finished the document in a week.
The time frame is in weeks, so it shows the average bull market cycle is 155 weeks or about 39 months. The average bear market is about 17 months, which actually matches the most recent bear market from October 2007 to March 2009 (17 months). A full market cycle is 56 months.
While the nominal Dow begins at 39 points in our chart, adjusting for inflation brings its real value up to 1,426 points. One thing to notice is just how long most secular market cycles are. The average length of all modern secular cycles is 194 months, and the median length is 200 months. That's a little less than 17 years -- about the amount of time needed for a new generation of investors to mature and enter the market.