How To React To A Bear

Experiencing your first bear market? Panicking? That won’t help you much. Investment expert Simon Brown has experienced falling markets before and provides tips to guide you through a bear.

- Simon Brown

As I write this, a week or so ahead of you reading it, our local Top40 index is off 20% from the intra-day highs of mid-November 2017*. That is officially a bear market, which is measured as a 20% draw-down from a high. If you only started investing post the global market meltdown of 2008/09, welcome to your first bear market.

Don’t panic.

Falling markets never feel nice – your investments are losing value and you’re scared to put new money into the market in case things fall still lower. And, if enough people feel this way, the buyers largely disappear and markets head even lower.