Stats › Bear markets and drawdowns › Bear markets
Every S&P 500 bear market since 1929
A bear market is just a big fall. Twenty percent or more off the peak, measured close to close, on a major index. That is the entire definition, and it gets used as though it says something precise about how bad things are going to get. It doesn't.
This page is the full list. Every S&P 500 bear market since 1929 on the Ned Davis Research count, how deep each one went, how long it took, and the bull markets that sat in between them. I put it together because "we're in a bear market" is a sentence people say with a lot of confidence and very little context, and the context turns out to be the interesting part. Twenty seven declines, an average of -35.2%, and almost none of them actually resembling the average. Fifteen of the twenty seven happened before 1950, which changes how you should read that average again.
One thing worth flagging before you scroll. The count itself is a choice. Ned Davis splits the 1929 to 1932 collapse into five separate bear markets. Yardeni calls it one, at -83%. Neither is cheating, they are answering different questions, and the average you get out the other end depends on which rule you picked. Every source used here is named and linked at the foot of the page, so if a number surprises you, follow it back to where it came from.
There have been 27 bear markets in the S&P 500 since 1929 on the Ned Davis Research definition. The average one took the index down 35.2% over 289 days, a little under ten months. The deepest was the 1931 to 1932 leg at -61.81%, the fastest was February to March 2020 at 33 days, and the most recent ended in October 2022 after a -25.43% decline. Against that, the average bull market has gained 113.9% over 992 days, which is why the market has risen in roughly 78% of the years since 1928 despite spending 21.4 of them in bear territory.
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Below this point there are 10 sections, 3 charts, 1 table and 4 named sources, roughly 1500 words of it. Every figure carries the source it came from and the date the data is from.
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