Bear Market Quotes & Sayings

In a bull market, everyone becomes an expert! In a bear market, everyone becomes wise! — Amit Trivedi

Bear Market Begin Bear Market End Max DD Sept 1929 June 1932 -86.25 July 1933 March 1935 -33.9% March 1937 March 1938 -54.5% Nov 1938 April 1942 -45.8% May 1946 June 1949 -29.6% July 1957 Oct 1957 -20.6% Dec 1961 June 1962 -28% Feb 1966 Oct 1966 -22.2% Oct 1968 May 1970 -34% Jan 1973 Oct 1974 -48.2% Sept 1976 March 1978 -19.4% Nov 1980 Aug 1982 -27.1% Aug 1987 Dec 1987 -40.4% July 1990 Oct 1990 -21.2% Mar 2000 Oct 2002 -49.1% June 2008 Mar 2009 -54% Average Bear Market: -37.3% Buy and Hold since 1942 Compounded Annual Rate of Return: 8.03% Maximum Draw down: 54% Prior to this decade's two severe bear markets, most investors believed that only that the stock market can go up. — Andrew Abraham

There is no training, classroom or otherwise, that can prepare for trading the last third of a move, whether it's the end of a bull market or the end of a bear market. — Paul Tudor Jones

Bonds despite their ridiculous yields will not easily be threatened with a new bear market, — Bill Gross

It takes a man a long time to learn all the lessons of all of his mistakes. They say there are two sides to everything. But there is only one side to the stock market; and it is not the bull side or the bear side, but the right side. It took me longer to get that general principle fixed firmly in my mind than it did most of the more technical phases of the game of stock speculation. — Edwin Lefevre

two well-recognized economic principles. First, the firmer the monopolistic controls in a given market, the higher the prices. Second, monopoly prices are discriminatory prices. "Charging all the traffic will bear" does not mean that all the traffic will bear the same charge! In fact, it will not. — George W. Stocking

Much of the story we have told falls outside the boundaries of modern academic disciplines and their respective histories. Contemporary economics focuses on issues of efficiency in allocation, political science on institutions of governmental power, political theory on questions of justice, sociology on social groups as defined by interactions outside the market. Some division of intellectual labor is of course productive, and the conceptual lenses that each discipline brings to bear may genuinely help us see an aspect of reality that would otherwise remain undetected. Yet those concerned with the moral implications and ramifications of the market
as any self-critical person in modern society ought to be
get a very skewed picture when they view it through only one of these lenses. Seeing the market with the added perspectives offered by the thinkers treated here provides us with a richer and more rounded view. — Jerry Z. Muller

The fact that the bond market is rallying today is a plus. If this ends up being a bear market, it will be one of the first ever that began when interest rates are down. — John Manley

Any bull market covers a multitude of sins, so there may be all sorts of problems with the current system that we won't see until the bear market comes. — Ron Chernow

The average man doesn't wish to be told that it is a bull or a bear market. What he desires is to be told specifically which particular stock to buy or sell. He wants to get something for nothing. He does not wish to work. He doesn't even wish to have to think. — Jesse Lauriston Livermore

Nothing beats a little cash in a bear market, of course, and the oldest form of cash is gold. — James Grant

I think that I could have been take apart if the bear market continued, but I waited three years before I felt the bear market was over and I was right. — Jim Cramer

Americans believe that the bottom line isn't everything, it's the only thing, and America is strangling on that lack of vision."13 Bennis also noted, "It isn't either a bull or a bear market anymore, it's a pig market."14 — Richard Blackaby

On 17th January 1569, Agnes Bowker of Market Harborough, Leicestershire, allegedly gave birth to a cat. According to the midwife, Elizabeth Harrison, Agnes had told her of how "the likeness of a bear, sometimes like a dog, sometimes like a man" had carnal knowledge of her in its various guises. Harrison went on to describe how Agnes gave birth to the cat, "the hinder part coming first". The other six women who were present at the birth were questioned, but none seemed very sure of what had happened. One Margaret Harrison said "that she was at the birth of the monster with her child in her arms, — Claire Ridgway

Recycling is better--I won't write "good"--for the environment. But without economics--without supply and demand of raw materials--recycling is nothing more than a meaningless exercise in glorifying garbage. No doubt it's better than throwing something into an incinerator, and worse than fixing something that can be refurbished. It's what you do if you can't bear to see something landfilled. Placing a box or a can or a bottle in a recycling bin doesn't mean you've recycled anything, and it doesn't make you a better, greener person: it just means you've outsourced your problem. Sometimes that outsourcing is near home; and sometimes it's overseas. But wherever it goes, the global market and demand for raw materials is the ultimate arbiter.

Fortunately, if that realization leaves you feeling bad, there's always the alternative: stop buying so much crap in the first place. (269) — Adam Minter

The upward move at the beginning of a bull market is almost always huge compared with the vacillations late in the bear market. If you try to pick a bottom, you will miss a good part of the action. — Kenneth Fisher

The starting point of my career in money management in 1973-74 was the time of the only true bear market any living non-Japanese investor has seen in major markets. Equities, real estate, you name it, everyone got run over. — Paul Singer

All the cartoonists at heart liked him, and there was seldom or never anything bitter or really unfriendly in their portrayals of him; they were uniformly good-natured." Caricatures even transformed his failure during a mid-November bear hunt into a triumph, conjuring an image of the president steadfastly refusing to shoot a small bear furnished for the occasion. As renditions of the original Clifford Berryman cartoon proliferated, the bear dwindled in size until he appeared as a tiny cub, prompting toy store owners to market stuffed bears in honor of Teddy Roosevelt. Soon the Teddy bear became one of the most cherished toys of all time. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

Secular cycles are the long periods - as long as decades - that come to define each market era. These cycles alternate between long-term bull and bear markets. — Barry Ritholtz

The lion's share of the bear market is over, ... It's a two-part issue. Yes, the marketplace could be nasty. But there's a great deal of nastiness that's already happened in the bond market. — Paul McCulley

In general, the hedge funds were clobbered by the 1969 bear market, ending up in many cases with records that were worse than those put together by aggressive mutual funds denied the luxury of short sales. — Carol Loomis

Ronald Coase, in his classic 1937 paper on 'The Nature of the Firm,' was the first to bring the concept of transaction costs to bear on the study of firm and market organization. — Oliver E. Williamson

It should be noted that people in the free market rarely bear false witness; integrity is the rule. The morning mile, phone calls, planes the airlines buy, autos by the millions - no one could list the instances - are as represented. We have daily, eloquent, enormous testimony that the Ten Commandments can be and are observed by fallible human beings. Contemporary politics is the most glaring of all exceptions. — Leonard Read

The last leg of a bull market always ends in hysteria; the last leg of a bear market always ends in panic. — Jim Rogers

We insist on producing a farm surplus, but think the government should find a profitable market for it. We overindulge in speculation, but ask the government to prevent panics. Now the only way to hold the government entirely responsible for conditions is to give up our liberty for a dictatorship. If we continue the more reasonable practice of managing our own affairs we must bear the burdens of our own mistakes. A free people cannot shift their responsibility for them to the government. Self-government means self-reliance. — Calvin Coolidge

Value #1: Reality Huh? Isn't every business based on reality? In fact, isn't everything based on reality? Actually, no. Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, AIG (American International Group), IndyMac, Washington Mutual, Countrywide, and all the other banks that blew themselves to smithereens in 2008 weren't basing their businesses on reality. They were basing their businesses on sheer fantasy, wish, and whim - and an unhealthy dose of greed, the most unrealistic thing of all. They believed the housing market would always go up. Credit markets would never be illiquid. People with no jobs could pay back their mortgages. — Donald Luskin

Our seniors' retirement should never rely on the bull of political promises or the bear of the market. — Barbara Mikulski

Market discipline can only limit moral hazard to the extent that debt and equity holders believe that, in the event of distress, they will bear costs. — Ben Bernanke

Be a Flea, not a Bull or a Bear. Don't delay, retire anyway. Trading is NOT a four letter word. Buy carefully, sell aggressively. Don't mark duds while drinking. When your plan fails, change it. Don't be slow, don't be greedy. Don't be obtuse with a machine gun pointed at you. There's still time to build wealth and retire well.

The Stock Market Flea: Lessons from the Front — James J. Houts

Near the top of the market, investors are extraordinarily optimistic because they've seen mostly higher prices for a year or two. The sell-offs witnessed during that span were usually brief. Even when they were severe, the market bounced back quickly and always rose to loftier levels. At the top, optimism is king, speculation is running wild, stocks carry high price/earnings ratios, and liquidity has evaporated. A small rise in interest rates can easily be the catalyst for triggering a bear market at that point. — Martin Zweig

The bear, which by now was as large as the cathedral on Catherine's canal, rose on its hind legs like a dancing bear in a street market. For a moment the sun was blotted out by its size, and then it fell. As it fell, it came apart. It disintegrated. It fell like brown snow, but each flake was a person. The bear had been one hundred thousand people, and now the people came to earth, tumbling into the snowy streets of the city and picking themselves up, laughing at it all. Far from being hurt, they realised that they felt strong. But, like the bear, they felt hungry. They ran through the streets, swarming like bees, joining others who had emerged when the sun had. It was chaos. — Marcus Sedgwick

Short a bear market, go long in a bull market, either play, you do it on a hunch, harbor a whole lot of hope, then sit back and try not to bite your nails. Because no one knows anything for sure. Foresight is a hunch. Everyone is making it up as best they can, and life's winners are those who smile at the truth of it and can cut a wake through a Sargasso of ego, guesswork, bullshit and chance. — Simon Pont

If buying equities seem the most hazardous and foolish thing you could possibly do, then you are near the bottom that will end the bear market. — Joseph Granville

As a bull market turns into a bear market, the new pros turn into optimists, hoping and praying the bear market will become a bull and save them. But as the market remains bearish, the optimists become pessimists, quit the profession, and return to their day jobs. This is when the real professional investors re-enter the market. — Robert Kiyosaki

Josh bear-hugs St Clair. "I'm sorry you're off the market."
"Don't tell Anna, but I bought one for you, too," St Clair says. — Stephanie Perkins

In the early days of the crash it was widely believed that Jesse L. Livermore, a Bostonian with a large and unquestionably exaggerated reputation for bear operations, leading a syndicate that was driving the market down. — John Kenneth Galbraith

I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars. — Henry David Thoreau

There is only one side of the market and it is not the bull side or the bear side, but the right side. — Jesse Livermore

I never hesitate to tell a man that I am bullish or bearish. But I do not tell people to buy or sell any particular stock. In a bear market all stocks go down and in a bull market they go up. — Jesse Lauriston Livermore

In a bear market, you have to use sharp countertrend rallies to sell. — Bruce Kovner

The longer the bull market lasts the more severely investors will be affected with amnesia; after five years or so, many people no longer believe that bear markets are possible. — Benjamin Graham

Bring market forces to bear on health care insurers. Creating a health care 'exchange,' one of the better ideas included in House Bill 3200, creates affordable, accessible and portable insurance for millions of Americans. — Andrew P. Harris

Normally, if you have a huge category that leads a bear market all the way down to the bottom - like tech after 2000, or energy in the '80-'82 bear market - you get one quick pop, and then years of lag as we fight the old war. — Kenneth Fisher

In Reno, there is always a bull market, never a bear market, for the stocks and bonds of happiness. — Virgilia Peterson

The new structure of the U.S. stock market had removed the big Wall Street banks from their historic, lucrative role as intermediary. At the same time it created, for any big bank, some unpleasant risks: that the customer would somehow figure out what was happening to his stock market orders. And that the technology might somehow go wrong. If the markets collapsed, or if another flash crash occurred, the high-frequency traders would not take 85 percent of the blame, or bear 85 percent of the costs of the inevitable lawsuits. The banks would bear the lion's share of the blame and the costs. The relationship of the big Wall Street banks to the high-frequency traders, when you thought about it, was a bit like the relationship of the entire society to the big Wall — Michael Lewis

A defensive investor can always prosper by looking patiently and calmly through the wreckage of a bear market. — Benjamin Graham

In a correction, other people's stocks go down, in a bear market, your stocks go down. — Alan Abelson

First check whether the market as a whole is rising or falling. In other words, are you in a bull market or bear market? If the latter, stay out. The odds are against you. — Nicolas Darvas

BEATRICE Is he not approved in the height a villain that hath slandered, scorned, dishonoured my kinswoman? O that I were a man! What, bear her in hand until they come to take hands, and then, with public accusation, uncovered slander, unmitigated rancour - O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market-place. — William Shakespeare

Fifty years later, in the 1920s, the American DuPont Company independently set up a similar unit and called it a Developmental Department. This department gathers innovative ideas from all over the company, studies them, thinks them through, analyses them. Then it proposes to top management which ones should be tackled as major innovative projects. From the beginning, it brings to bear on the innovation all the resources needed: research, development, manufacturing, marketing, finance, and so on. It is in charge until the new product or service has been on the market for a few years. — Peter F. Drucker

At least us old men remember what a real bear market is like, and the young men haven't got a clue. — Jeremy Grantham

For those properly prepared, the bear market is not only a calamity but an opportunity. — John Templeton

A price decline is of no real importance to the bona fide investor unless it is either very substantial say, more than a third from cost or unless it reflects a known deterioration of consequence in the company's position. In a well-defined bear market many sound common stocks sell temporarily at extraordinary low prices. It is possible that the investor may then have a paper loss of fully 50 per cent on some of his holdings, without any convincing indication that the underlying values have been permanently affected. — Benjamin Graham

Whenever the investor sold out in an upswing as soon as the top level of the previous well-recognized bull market was reached, he had a chance in the next bear market to buy back at one third (or better) below his selling price. — Benjamin Graham

I have never known a great trader, with his first reputation established as a bear operator, who did not either turn bull or drop out of the market altogether. — William Peter Hamilton