Bear market

A bear market names a prolonged fall in prices across a market or an instrument. The most widely used marker is a decline of twenty percent or more from the most recent high, measured on closing prices. That figure has no regulatory or academic standing whatever. It entered financial journalism as a round number and survived because it is easy to check, and different publications apply it to different indices, over different windows, and to closing or to intraday prices.

A shallower fall is usually called a correction, again conventionally at ten percent. The boundary between the two is the whole difficulty, because a decline is only classified once the threshold has been crossed, so the label always arrives after the move it names. Some analysts prefer a definition built on the sequence of successive highs and lows, or on the duration of a decline rather than its depth, and those definitions produce a different set of dates for the same history.

The term describes what prices have done and carries no statement about what they will do next. The historical record holds sustained declines of very different depths and lengths, some resolved within months and some running for years, and the threshold that names them is blind to that difference. The same word is also used of sentiment, where bearish means only that a speaker expects a fall, which is a claim about the speaker rather than about the market.