Select what genuinely interests you. Your picks feed directly into our editorial planning. A bear market is a period of falling prices in which a market trades at least 20 percent below its last high. The S&P 500 has gone through exactly 27 bear markets since 1928; on average prices fell 35 percent, and 9.4 months passed from peak to trough. As of November 5, 2026, Bitcoin is in the middle of a bear market, 39 percent below its record from October 2025. The Nasdaq 100 is in a correction, 14.7 percent off its high, while the S&P 500 and the DAX are far from the threshold.