Bear Market Winners Make Fortunes
No doubt you have heard people talk about bull markets and bear markets before. For those who don’t know what the terms mean: A bear market is nothing else but a continuous and sustained drop in the price of a wide selection of stocks over a period of time. Usually a market has to remain in a declining phase for at least two months and drop by at least 20% before described as a “bear”.
A bull market is exactly the opposite of a bear. Prices start rising and continue to rise with more than twenty percent for more than two months. Just as pessimism drives a market with dropping prices even further down, optimism drives a bull market upwards.
You shouldn’t get confuse a declining market and a normal market correction. A market correction happens after a sudden increase in the price level when people sell their stocks to take profit. It normally doesn’t last more than a few days.
It’s not difficult to understand how people make money in a bull market – it’s in fact difficult not to make money when prices go up all the time! How do traders make money while prices are dropping though?
One way to make money in a declining market is to accurately predict when it reaches its bottom and then invest in a selection of prime stock tips. You can use fundamental or technical indicators to try and predict the end of the drop in prices. This is very difficult to do, however. Even the experts often falter when it comes to correctly predicting the end of a slump in prices.
Of course you always have the option to sell stocks short. This is rather less complicated than it sounds: all that happens is that you borrow a certain number of stocks from a brokerage at the (high) price of today and sell it to a third party at the same price. If you were right and the market actually drops, you then buy the same shares at the new low price and return them to the broker.
A further course of action is to buy so-called put options, which increase in price when the market declines. Once again you have to be pretty sure it’s actually a bear market which is still in a declining phase, otherwise you will lose the money you risked on the option.
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