What smart investors do in bear markets

Financial professionals love to argue that bear markets hit bottom when individual investors give up on stocks in a crescendo or ‘capitulation’ of panic selling.

4 min read . Updated: 09 Jul 2022, 01:44 PM IST Jason Zweig, The Wall Street Journal

Since you can’t predict the unpredictable, you should control the controllable

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Part of what makes bear markets so unbearable is that nobody—and I mean nobody—knows when or how they will end. That doesn’t stop everyone on Wall Street from flogging measures, hunches and folklore purporting to foretell when stocks will finally stop falling. However, intelligent investors don’t bother trying to predict the unpredictable; they focus on controlling the controllable. That’s the psychological key to surviving this—and any—bear market, no matter how long it lasts. To see clearly why it’s so important to get your priorities straight, let’s look quickly at three beliefs about when bear markets end.