Bear Market

Hopefully, you didn’t bother looking, and I can be the first to tell you.

While we still cannot call the end of the Bear Market from this performance, today’s returns strongly suggest that 15 months ago, October 12, 2022 was the end of this bear market.

The incongruity between feeling like we are in a bear market for 61.66% of trading days and actually being in a bear market for only 24.81% of those days unfortunately makes bear markets feel longer than they really are.

Stay the course. Rebalance. Don’t peek.

The S&P 500 saw an intraday bear market today, dipping over 20% down from a prior high and then correcting back before the day’s close.

Those who flat-lined to cash or who waited to invest their cash until the markets looked better missed out on the recovery.

Diversification is important. Diversification did not eliminate losses, but it did lose less and recover more quickly.

While the appreciation allocation helps you achieve your financial goals, introducing a stability allocation into your portfolio can prevent your portfolio from running out of money.

Convert something today. Convert because the markets are down, or maybe convert just because you likely won’t regret it in 30 years when the markets will likely be up a lot more than they are now.

Neither the dire pessimism at the start of the Bull Market of the 1990s nor the blind optimism at the end were warranted.

To make the strategy of jumping in and out of the markets successful would require a precision only achieved by luck.

This Bear market has one of the largest single day losses.

Bear markets are often a precipitous decline followed by a slower and steadier recovery. Volker’s Bear is rare in that a slow and steady decline was followed by a sharp precipitous recovery.

This Bear market is considered one of the greatest challenges to retirement planning.

Bear Markets are unpredictable, but there is no reason that they should be a cause of distress.

Examining past Bear Markets can help provide some context when we experience the next one.

Here are seven sage investing lessons from the J. Paul Getty era.

The lessons of each bear market are visible with the wisdom of 20/20 hindsight.