Are we in a bull or bear market? If you came to this article for an answer, forget about it. If you think you know the answer, forget about it. One of the challenges of trading the markets is not knowing the answer. For example, earlier this year Ben Bernanke of the Federal Reserve announced that the Fed was buying treasury securities, which to all stretches of the imagination would trigger a bull market in treasuries. Now then, if you jumped in and bet the farm, you are the proud owner of a huge losses as the treasury market fell out of bed during recent months.
This is not to say that we shouldn't do our research to determine in our minds where the market is going. There are those analysts who look at long-term trends lasting for several years and sometimes decades. These longer periods are called "secular" trends. Then we have others who look at shorter periods, which are often called. "cyclical" moves. The "cyclical" moves usually fall within the longer "secular" markets.
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