This is an excerpt from The Big Picture.com:

Thomas Lee, US Equity Strategy at JPMorgan writes: “Believe or not, retracing 12-year lows for the Dow is an incredibly rare event. Besides the retest of 1997 lows seen on Monday, this has only happened two other times, on April 8, 1932, and December 6, 1974.”

Given the rarity of the event, it is worth taking a closer look at the past instances: The 12 year low in 1932 was ~three months before the end of the bear market. In 1974, it was exactly the low for that bear market.

Dan Greenhaus of Miller Tabak adds, in both cases, “the economy continued contracting beyond the bear market bottoms; this is typical of recessions. Unemployment continued rising and GDP remained weak. The 1974 Bear market ended in December, but GDP contracted even in the Q1 1975 at a 4.7% clip