Financial media calls almost every down week a "bear market moment" and almost every up week the start of a new bull run. The actual definitions are more specific, and the honest answer to "which one are we in right now" is usually "we don't know yet — and neither does anyone confidently telling you otherwise."
The textbook definitions
- Bull market: a sustained period of rising prices, conventionally defined as a 20%+ rise from a recent low, typically accompanied by broad participation (most sectors/stocks rising, not just a handful) and improving sentiment.
- Bear market: the mirror image — a sustained decline, conventionally a 20%+ drop from a recent high, usually with broadening pessimism and often, though not always, tied to a weakening economic backdrop.
Both definitions are drawn with hindsight — a 20% threshold can only be confirmed after price has actually moved that far, which is precisely the problem with using the label as a real-time trading signal.
Why "which one are we in" is the wrong first question
The definitions are retrospective, so waiting for confirmation that you're "in a bear market" means you've already absorbed most of the decline before the label technically applies. The more useful real-time framing isn't the bull/bear label — it's the same regime questions covered in what a market regime actually is: is price above or below its longer-term trend, is that trend rising or falling, and how has volatility behaved recently. Those can be measured today, continuously, without waiting for a 20% threshold to be crossed and named after the fact.
What actually differs by phase, mechanically
Bull and bear conditions aren't just "green vs. red" — they tend to behave differently in ways that matter for strategy selection:
- Bull markets tend to have shallower, faster pullbacks and reward staying invested through minor dips.
- Bear markets tend to have sharp, violent counter-trend rallies (the "bear market rally") that lure in trend-followers before resuming the decline — one of the most consistent ways trend-following strategies get whipsawed.
- Volatility usually rises faster on the way down than it fell on the way up — declines tend to be sharper and more sentiment-driven than the grind higher that preceded them.
The practical implication
Don't wait for a headline to confirm which "market" you're in — by the time it's confirmed, most of the move is already priced in. Instead, track the same underlying evidence continuously: trend direction, trend persistence, and volatility. That's a regime read you can act on in real time, rather than a label applied in hindsight.
This is why Atradian's regime classification runs continuously rather than waiting for a round-number confirmation, and why the product separates crypto and equity regime tracking rather than assuming one label describes every market at once — a "bull market" in one asset class says very little about the state of another.