Stats › Bear markets and drawdowns › 2022 bear market
The 2022 bear market
A bear market usually gets remembered as a single number, and for 2022 that number is 25.43%. Which sounds like a bad year rather than a disaster. Plenty of people who sat through it will tell you it felt a lot worse than a bad year, and they're not exaggerating. They're describing something the headline figure leaves out.
So this page lays 2022 out properly. When it started, when it ended, how deep it went, how long it took, and where it sits among the 27 bear markets since 1929. Then the part that actually explains the feeling: how differently the same decline landed depending on what you happened to own. The Dow lost 8.78% over the calendar year. The Nasdaq 100 lost 32.97%. Same market, same twelve months, close to four times the damage. Bonds fell at the same time, which is the other half of the story. I built this page because 2022 is the most recent bear market and the one most people trading today have actually lived through, so it quietly becomes the yardstick they measure every later wobble against.
None of this is meant to rank 2022 against anything as an argument about what comes next. It's here as a reference point, because the most recent thing you've been through tends to become the shape you expect the next one to have, and that's worth checking against the record rather than against memory. Sources sit at the bottom, each with the date its data was pulled. If a figure here changes how you think about something, go and read it where it came from.
The S&P 500 fell 25.43% between 3 January and 12 October 2022, over 282 days, the most recent entry in the bear market record. By historical standards it was mild, ranking among the shallower of the 27 declines since 1929 against an average of -35.2%. What made it unusual was the dispersion: the Nasdaq 100 lost 32.97% while the Dow lost only 8.78%, and Energy returned +65.7% while Information Technology lost 28.2%.
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Below this point there are 7 sections, 1 chart and 3 named sources, roughly 1200 words of it. Every figure carries the source it came from and the date the data is from.
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