What is a bear market?
The terms ‘bear’ and ‘bull’ are said to have been used in the securities world since the early 18th century, when stock trading became popular in London. All in a days work – traders on Wall Street facing big losses In reality, experts have many, differing views on what constitutes a bear market. “When it hurts to look at the stock tables in the newspapers in the morning,” is how one professor in the States describes it. Some prefer a more considered definition, calling it a persistent and sustained decline in markets over a number of months. Traders have the expectation that markets will continue to go down, they ditch their shares and that compounds the problem. The flip side of the coin – the bull market – is when a market sees a long term, persistent uptrend, lasting anything from a few months to years. Many analysts believe that markets suffer from “herd mentality” – it it hard not to trade in the same direction as all traders believe the market is going, and it therefore becomes
