[junkypuppet]

I think you might’ve misread this table. If you count up the number of bear markets in the table and then look at which of those periods also had a recession, the number of bear markets that coincided with a recession is actually ~50%. Further, the table says they count a S&P500 decline of 19% as a bear market, which by our arbitrary standards, isn’t. So if you take those 19% drops out a recession actually coincides with a “true” bear market about ~65% of the time according to this table. I fail to see how you got 20%. Maybe you were looking at the length of recovery which it says on average is 20 months?

[thenerdhead]

I was commenting about how historically bear markets start around the 20% mark to the original comment regardless of a recession. This is consistent with many books on the subject too and thus isn’t just “arbitrary”. It has actual data going back hundreds of years