Barry Ritholtz asks the big question for stock market investors:
In terms of historical analogies, investors should be asking themselves: Is this move more like 1982 or 1974?
It’s gotta be 1974. Late that year, the stock market began to bounce back from the collapse of 1973-1974. It topped out in late 1976, then spent the next six years treading water. By 1982 stocks were really, really cheap. Not because prices kept dropping, but because corporate earnings rose and stock prices failed to keep up. We haven’t hit the stocks-are-really-really-cheap moment in this bear market just yet (we had a stocks-are-pretty-reasonably-priced moment in March, but that has passed). There’s no law that says this has to happen before a secular bear market can end. But I bet it will before this bear goes away.