Happy demi-anniversary, stock market rally. Will the honeymoon ever end?

Six months ago, this "relentless rally" took off and it has so far delivered stock investors the kind of bounty that would make for a very good year in any age.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 index bottomed at 1,353 on Nov. 15, as a sharp post-election selloff and policy panic were culminating, giving way to what has been a tireless climb that's confounded the cautious. The S&P 500 is up more than 22% since then, and up 13% so far in 2013, with healthcare, media and financial stocks leading the way — and without so much as a 4% pullback.

It’s fair to say that not many saw it playing out quite this way. Two days after the market low was set, the Wall Street Journal published Learning To Love Volatility, an essay by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of “The Black Swan,” the best seller that detailed the world’s knack for delivering unforeseen shocks.

Fair advice — at the time

It seemed like fair advice at the time, with

No, Google is not the new Apple, in most important respects.

The acceleration in Google Inc. (GOOG) shares above $900 this month, its impressive 41% gain over the past six months, the appearance of a few $1,000 analyst price targets and the avid sponsorship of the stock’s fans have prompted renewed comparisons to Apple Inc.’s (AAPL) massive surge-and-fizzle act last year.

Sure, they are both widely owned stocks of intensely respected (and feared and resented) technology bellwethers. They each have gaudily high share prices undiminished by stock splits. The company names both end in “-le.”

Yet the differences are clear and significant, and they work in favor of Google investors for now.

*The rate of ascent in Google shares has been far more subdued than the Apple moon-shot of 2012. In the first quarter of last year alone, Apple gained more than 50%, approximately twice the pace of Google’s entire year-to-date 2013 gain.

Apple last year ramped from $405 to an ultimate high in September

Already 50 months old, the bull market in stocks has finally started to act like one.

With the latest sprint in the indexes to all-time highs, the action is belatedly, but unmistakably, starting to follow the bulls’ old offensive playbook. While plenty of Americans remain unmoved to return to a stock market that has subjected them to two devastating collapses in 13 years, those who are in the market are increasingly displaying the kind of confident, risk-seeking behavior that typically accompanies strong uptrends.

This is evident in heavy borrowing in investment accounts, a surge in trading volume of penny stocks, the ferocious surge in heavily shorted stocks, eager bidding for initial stock offerings, the lionizing of anointed bullish gurus and a rediscovered habit to buy minor dips.

Ample anxiety remains in the broader public about the legitimacy of Wall Street’s celebration amid a trudging economic advance, even if the pervasive label of “most hated rally in history” has outlasted

The one-year charts of amusement-park company stocks look like roller coasters that only go up, at a steep angle.

Cedar Fair LP (FUN) and Six Flags Entertainment Corp. (SIX) are trading at 52-week highs and have gained 50% and 68% in the past year, respectively. SeaWorld Entertainment Inc. (SEAS) shares are up 37% to about $37 in the three weeks since its initial public offering was priced at $27 each.

These theme-park operators thrill investors who these days covet companies with a couple of key attributes: They do all their business in North America and benefit directly from peppier spending by Americans, who are enjoying firmer employment trends, recuperating housing markets, moderate gas prices and reduced debt burdens.

Having a few extra bucks and the confidence to spend, more Americans are taking a day or two to check out the latest taller-and-faster roller coaster at a regional amusement venue.

“The leisure industry, to some degree, helped lead the country out of recession,”

Just naming certain years in market history can tell a dramatic story: 1929 and 1987 denote generation-defining crashes, 1999 is code for easy-riches mania, 2008 for financial-system collapse.

The year 1995 tends to get lost in the general “late ‘90s bull market” period, yet it was one of the most distinctive years in market memory – a tireless, gentle, seemingly effortless upward glide to a 34% one-year gain for the Standard & Poor’s 500 index.

As profoundly different as today’s economic backdrop might appear, the steady, fear-defying rally of 2013 to date most closely resembles that of 1995 in its rhythm and pace, which is generating a bit of Wall Street chatter about what it might suggest as the possible nirvana scenario for investors.

Jonathan Krinsky, chief technical market analyst at institutional broker Miller Tabak, pointed out to clients this week that 1995 was the only time prior to 2013 when the S&P 500 got this far into a year without at least a 4% pullback, and in each

Big companies today are under the control of a Silent Generation of CEOs, reared under crisis conditions and rewarded more for quiet perseverance than boldness. As a result, even four years into an economic recovery and with global stock markets at new highs, big U.S. companies are in danger of taking too few chances to grow.

The Silent Generation is the name given to Americans born between 1925 and 1944, brought up amid the Great Depression and World War II to be sober, conventional and risk-averse.

While they have personally thrived during ebullient economic times throughout their careers and are quite wealthy and successful as a group, today’s CEOs largely assumed their leadership roles immediately before, during or in the wake of wrenching financial crisis, recession and the anxious repair process that has followed.

Defensive operations

This worry-shrouded environment has conditioned corporate decision makers to operate their businesses defensively, and can help account for

When Chief Executive Robert Iger opens the Walt Disney Co. (DIS) post-earnings conference call to questions late Tuesday, he won’t be asked again to justify the $4 billion he spent in 2009 to acquire Marvel Entertainment. Or, at least, he shouldn’t be.

The skyscraping $175 million domestic box-office take for the opening weekend of "Iron Man 3" was exceeded only by the previous Disney-Marvel release "The Avengers," which went on to collect $1.5 billion in ticket sales globally.

The latest "Iron Man" installment had already pulled in as much overseas as it is estimated to have grossed in its initial North American weekend in theaters. At its current trajectory, the latest Robert Downey Jr.-Gwyneth Paltrow save-the-world-through-cool-technology movie should reach $1 billion in global box office.

"Iron Man 3" is the final Marvel-inspired film covered under a pre-existing distribution agreement with Viacom Inc.’s (VIAB) Paramount Pictures – an arrangement that Iger wanted to get past

“Triumph of the Optimists” is a book chronicling investment returns over a century. But the title also suits the four-month-old 2013 stock market - almost as well as “Bonfire of the Pessimists.”

Not only is the broad Standard & Poor’s 500 index up an impressive 11.6% since Dec. 31, as the once-daunting turn-of-the-year fiscal-policy and consumer-spending risks proved overdone. But the shares of the most heavily shorted large stocks coming into the year have, on average, surged far more dramatically.

The most dramatic instance of naysayers getting burned in a widely disliked stock is Netflix Inc. (NFLX), which had the greatest number of shares sold short at the end of 2012 and the fifth-largest short position in the S&P 500 as a percentage of its freely traded shares.

The DVD-rental and video-streaming player sets off a lot of the usual sparks that get bears agitated – a highly valued stock relative to company profitability, tons of attendant marketing hype, a cult-like consumer