Introduction
Financial markets move in trends. It’s important to understand the differences between these trends to be able to make better investment decisions. How come? Well, different market trends can lead to wildly different market conditions. If you don’t know what the underlying trend is, how are you going to adapt to changing conditions?
A market trend is the overall direction that the market is going. In a bear market, prices are generally declining. Bear markets can be a challenging time to trade or invest in, especially for beginners.

Most crypto traders and technical analysts agree that Bitcoin has been in a macro bull trend throughout its existence. Even so, there have been several relentless cryptocurrency bear markets. These generally bring more than an 80% decline in the price of Bitcoin, while altcoins can easily experience more than 90% declines. What can you do during these times?
In this article, we’ll discuss what a bear market is, how you should prepare for it, and how you may be able to profit in it.

If you’d like to read about bull markets first, check out What Is A Bull Market?.

What is a bear market?
A bear market can be described as a period of declining prices in a financial market. Bear markets can be extremely risky and difficult to trade for inexperienced traders. They can easily lead to great losses and scare investors from ever returning to the financial markets. How come?
There’s this saying among traders: “Stairs up, elevators down.” This means that moves to the upside may be slow and steady, while moves to the downside tend to be more sharp and violent. Why is that? When the price starts crashing, many traders rush to exit the markets. They do that to either stay in cash or lock in profits from their long positions. This can quickly result in a domino effect where sellers rushing to the exit leads to even more sellers exiting their positions, and so on. The drop can be amplified even more if the market is highly leveraged. Mass liquidations will have an even more pronounced cascading effect, resulting in a violent sell-off.
With that said, bull markets can also have phases of euphoria. During these times, prices are increasing at an extreme rate, correlations are higher than usual, and a majority of assets are going up in tandem.
Typically, investors are “bearish” in a bear market, meaning that they expect prices to decline. This also means that market sentiment is generally quite low. However, this may not mean that all market participants are in active short positions. This just means that they expect prices to decline and may be looking to position themselves accordingly if the opportunity presents itself.

Bear market examples
As we’ve discussed, many investors think that Bitcoin has been in a macro bull trend since it started trading. Does that mean there aren’t bear markets contained in that bull run? No. After Bitcoin’s move to around $20,000 in December 2017, it’s had quite a brutal bear market.

https://www.fxmag.com/forex/bear-a-second-symbol-of-markets-what-do...