NEW YORK — Except for the media noise, there wasn't much euphoria on Wall Street this week as the Dow Jones industrial average hit an all-time high. With most investors' portfolios trailing the Dow's performance, the crowds weren't cheering too loudly for its record run.

Gone were the champagne toasts that ushered in the Dow's last record run, in 2000. This time, the party was limited to the lucky few who own a handful of blue-chip stocks. What the world's best-known stock index has been up to lately doesn't reflect the beat of today's market much at all.

The Dow — a weighted average of 30 large-cap stocks — in recent weeks had been closing in on its last record of 11,722.98, which was reached on Jan. 14, 2000, at the height of a stock market boom. It finally topped that on Tuesday and then extended that gain for the next two days.

Its comeback has been a long, bumpy and often grueling ride. It took six years and eight months to work off an ugly hangover from the dot-com bust and post-Sept. 11 blues and reach a new high. Typical rebounds after a bear market take four years and four months, according to Merrill Lynch.

The Dow tumbled 37 percent in a nasty two-year decline after the air came out of the Internet balloon, a recession began and corporate scandals mounted. Even after hitting a bottom in October 2002, the climb higher has been slow.

Things started looking up this summer, fueled by a decline in energy prices and by mounting signs that the Federal Reserve will not raise interest rates again this year. Sparking this week's record was a tumble in oil prices to seven-month lows.

Not only did that help push the Dow to a new high, it added to its strong 2006 run. The Dow is up more than 10 percent for the year.

But the celebration isn't being felt all around. Some of that is because other broad-market indictors are far from their record highs. The Standard & Poor's 500 index is still about 12 percent away from its record high of March 2000, while the Nasdaq composite index is still down about 55 percent from its peak that month.

Skeptics also say the Dow's record glosses over reality. For instance, of the 30 stocks that make up the Dow, only 10 — including Altria Group Inc. and Caterpillar Inc. — are trading above their January 2000 level. That means two-thirds of the Dow's stocks, including General Motors Corp., Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp., are trading well below what they were six years ago.

The Dow's new closing high is also 15 percent below its 2000 record in real terms when adjusted for inflation. The benchmark index is also trading well below its previous highs when adjusted for the decline in the dollar, which has fallen more than 25 percent since 2002 against other major currencies.

All that might explain why investors haven't been so giddy over the Dow's recent gains. They are more pessimistic about the market's current prospects. A new poll by Birinyi Associates Inc. of 50 Web investment blogs found 45 percent to be bearish, 40 percent bullish and 15 percent market neutral.