What this means: An investor who was unlucky enough to have invested a lump sum in the stock market on March 24, 2000, the bull-market high, but who stuck with his investment and reinvested all dividends along the way, was, on Thursday morning, in the black for the first time.

To be sure, the Standard & Poor's 500 index and the Nasdaq Composite Index remain well below their all-time highs. But those benchmarks do not represent the entire stock market; the S&P, of course, is dominated by large-cap growth stocks, and the Nasdaq by smaller-cap and midcap growth stocks.

But once we focus on the total value of all publicly traded stocks in the U.S., we get an entirely different picture. Such a focus is easy, of course, since Wilshire Associates calculates this total for us, in the form of the Dow Jones Wilshire 5000 index. Note carefully, however, that the version of this index that looks only at stock prices is not at an all-time high, since it does not include dividends. It is the dividend-adjusted version of the Dow Jones Wilshire 5000 that reached a new all-time high Thursday morning.

Since the 2000-02 bear market ended in October 2002, this also means that it took the stock market just under four years to overcome the bear market's damage. Since that bear market was one of the worst in U.S. stock-market history, this relatively brief recovery time attests to the strength of the bull market.

For example, it took the Dow Jones Industrial Average some 16 years -- from 1966 to 1982 -- to rise convincingly above the 1,000 level first reached in 1966.

Does the new all-time high for the Dow Jones Wilshire 5000 index have any investment significance? Investment advisers are divided, not surprisingly.

But one implication is clear, I would think: The new high makes it difficult to maintain that the stock market's rise since 2002 has merely been a bear-market rally in the context of a long-term bear market that began in March 2000. More than a few investment-newsletter editors are strong believers in this bear-market-rally story, and it will be interesting to see in the coming days whether they change their tune in light of what happened Thursday morning.

Mark Hulbert is the founder of Hulbert Financial Digest in Annandale, Va. He has been tracking the advice of more than 160 financial newsletters since 1980.