Bear Market

“Experience in former markets indicates that just as they are too high in bull markets, they get too low in bear markets.”

“By the time market declines (or advances) are front-page news, they usually have run their course.”

“Being bearish or cautious always sounds smarter than being bullish.”

“Investing is all about probabilities, and just because there appears to be a strong consensus prices are going to keep going up, doesn’t mean that is wrong, or right. The consensus does tend to be wrong at the turning points, being invariably bullish at the top and bearish at the bottom.”

“One of the brightest operators who ever played the unbeatable game once told me that all he asked in a bull market — or a bear market, for that matter — was to be the last fool but one.”

“Firmly believing that stock speculation is an unbeatable game, I have come to the conclusion that while no bear operator ever made a large fortune in the stock market and kept it, unless he trusteed it, the greatest losses are sustained by the bulls, not because they are bulls, but because there are more of them — more optimists than pessimists.”

“One of the important factors behind the fluctuation between bull and bear markets, between booms and crashes and bubbles, is that investor memory has to fail us – and fail universally – in order for the extremes to be reached.”

“If you think Treasuries have no risk and high yield bonds have risk, the yield spread is there to compensate for the bearing of that incremental risk. The question is whether it is adequate.”

“A lot of people can’t bear to sell when a stock’s price is going up. They’re convinced that they’ve made a mistake if they don’t hold out for the last dollar.”

“There will be bear markets about twice every 10 years and recessions about twice every 10 or 12 years but nobody has been able to predict them reliably. So the best thing to do is to buy when shares are thoroughly depressed and that means when other people are selling.”

“I’ve studied the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and I don’t see anywhere that we have to have a recession every four years. I don’t see why you can’t have a decent environment for years and years.”

“There is no Ground Hog Day, when all the economists come out from the tunnel and declare the recession is over. They have a retroactive, seasonally-adjusted Ground Hog Day.”

“Every time you have one of these recessions, there are always groups who say it is different this time. We won’t get out of this one.”

““This one is different,” is the doomsayer’s litany, and, in fact, every recession is different, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to ruin us.”

“Every recession brings out the skeptics who doubt that we will ever come out of it, and who predict that we will soon fall into a depression, when new cars will sit unsold in the showrooms forever and houses will stand empty, and the country will go bankrupt.”

“You get recessions, you have stock market declines. If you don’t understand that’s going to happen, then you’re not ready. You won’t do well in the markets. If you go to Minnesota in January, you should know it’s gonna be cold. You don’t panic when the thermometer falls below zero.”

“I’m bearish when companies’ profits go to hell.”

“The stock market has a 100% record, in the last 50 years, of predicting upturns in the economy. It’s never been wrong. It’s less than 50-50 on a downturn.”

“The man in the street associates the acquisition of wealth with rising markets; failures, ruin, depression, panics with falling markets.”

“In analyzing stocks, industrials or otherwise, the speculator must constantly bear in mind that no two companies are strictly comparable. He must always be prepared to make due allowance for points of unlikeness.”

“Bull markets and bear markets last long enough so that the average trader is likely to forget by the time the climax is approaching that any sort of movement is possible.”

“Recessions are not failures — they’re necessary corrections”

“After a stock market decline, people may perceive more risk than before when, in fact, the decline may have taken some of the risk out of the market.”

“It would be silly to expect every bear market to turn into the Great Depression. It would be equally wrong to expect that a fall from overvalued, to more fairly valued, couldn’t badly overshoot on the downside.”

“It is only in a bear market that the value investing discipline becomes especially important because value investing, virtually alone among strategies, gives you exposure to the upside with limited downside risk.”

“Stock market efficiency is an elegant hypothesis that bears quite limited resemblance to the real world.”

“We would rather underperform in a huge bull market than get clobbered in a really bad bear market.”

“The first thing I heard when I got in the business, not from my mentor, was bulls make money, bears make money, and pigs get slaughtered. I’m here to tell you I was a pig. And I strongly believe the only way to make long-term returns in our business that are superior is by being a pig.”

“An old saying is that in a bull market, your time horizons grow longer and longer. In a bear market, they grow shorter and shorter.”