Domestic stocks are flirting with a bear market
The S&P 500 is down roughly ~5% over the past month, the same can be said of the Nasdaq, and the Dow Jones is down over ~7% in that same time frame. Now, technically, a “bear market” is defined as a downturn of more than 20%, but in modern stock markets (especially in the US), drops like this feel way more dramatic because we’re all acutely tuned in, checking portfolios, reading doomsday predictions and headlines on social media — so, yeah, it’s totally fair to say that this feels like a bear market.
And it’s easy to blame this on geopolitics and call it avoidable — fair, but let’s also zoom out for a second: The S&P 500 has historically returned around ~10% annually, but over the past seven years, it’s averaged just over ~17%, which is unprecedented, and that includes four years with returns of 25% or more, which is wild. We say all of this to say: Corrections are inevitable, especially when you’ve had euphoria for the past seven years. The actual catalyst for the correction is also inevitable — it really doesn’t matter what it is, it’s just a conduit for investors to justify market behavior. War, interest rates, banking collapse, whatever it may be, the actual reason is just a heuristic — it will happen regardless. Historically, bear markets have come around every 3.5 years on average. When was our last one? 2022, just over four years ago. We’re kind of due.
Now, the good news is that this doesn’t mean it’s a foregone conclusion — no one can predict the future. From a technical standpoint, some positive signs are beneath the surface: Almost half of stocks in the S&P 500 are oversold right now, meaning that, technically speaking, the data says this is dramatic. Other signs point to a potential relief rally. One Bespoke stat puts this into perspective: When stocks get this oversold, the S&P 500 is typically already down about 19% from its highs. Right now, it’s less than 5% off its peak. In other words, the kind of selling you’d expect in a full-blown correction is already happening under the surface—even though the index doesn’t look like it yet. Historically, setups like this have been more consistent with short-term washouts than prolonged downturns.
So after all that — years of outsized returns, a pullback that feels worse than it is, internals that look worse than the index, and a dozen “this is it” headlines—we’re basically right back where we always end up: trying to make sense of something that doesn’t fully make sense in real time.
Some of the damage may already be behind us. Or this could just be the part where it starts to show up in the index. Both are completely plausible.
The reality is, markets don’t send a calendar invite for the next move — they just do it.
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