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I mean you can lookup past examples and see trends here that many bear markets that may/may not have coincided with a recession were in fact ~20%.

https://i0.wp.com/lplresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08...

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I think you might’ve misread this table. If you count up the number of bear markets in the table and then look at which of those periods also had a recession, the number of bear markets that coincided with a recession is actually ~50%. Further, the table says they count a S&P500 decline of 19% as a bear market, which by our arbitrary standards, isn’t. So if you take those 19% drops out a recession actually coincides with a “true” bear market about ~65% of the time according to this table. I fail to see how you got 20%. Maybe you were looking at the length of recovery which it says on average is 20 months?

I was commenting about how historically bear markets start around the 20% mark to the original comment regardless of a recession. This is consistent with many books on the subject too and thus isn’t just “arbitrary”. It has actual data going back hundreds of years

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