Is the Bull Market Over? The Masses aren’t Euphoric Yet
April 29, 2025
Big Bang: The Crowd’s Terror Is Rocket Fuel
Erase the tired script. When someone asks, Is the Bull Market Over? They’re really asking, Is it safe yet? But safety is a mirage, and the true engine of markets is uncertainty—nervous energy, collective doubt, and the primal urge to flee. The paradox is this: the bull market does not die in a panic, but in a lull—when everyone’s asleep, fully invested, and convinced that risk has been banished. If you want to see where the next move comes from, don’t look at the headlines. Look at the trembling hands of the crowd. That’s where the next rally seeds itself.
Trade wars, tariffs, and rolling headlines about impending doom? That’s prime territory for the patient contrarian. When sentiment vectors point to maximum fear, the system is not dying—it’s coiling, ready to spring.
Portal One: Technical Analysis—The Pulse Beneath the Panic
Technical analysis is often dismissed as fortune-telling with squiggly lines, but that’s the language of the uninitiated. In reality, technicals are the nervous system of the market—a readout of crowd psychology, liquidity, and momentum all at once.
Look at the great panics:
- March 2009: The S&P 500 formed a textbook bullish divergence on the RSI while the news was saturated with stories of economic collapse. The moving averages bottomed out, volume surged on up-days, and the VIX (Volatility Index) hit record highs. Technical signals flashed “opportunity” while the crowd screamed “run.”
- March 2020: As COVID-19 fears peaked, the RSI and MACD hit extremes, but price action showed capitulation, not a trend break. The bear was declared alive and well, yet in a matter of weeks, the fastest bull market in history was born from those ashes.
Technical analysis is not about predicting the future with certainty; it’s about mapping probability vectors. Support zones, trendlines, and momentum indicators are not mystical—they’re emergent properties of millions of collective decisions. When a market is oversold and sentiment is at rock bottom, technicals often whisper truths the news will not: the panic is overdone, the bounce is near.
And yet, technicals are only one dimension of the chaos. To read the market, you must also understand the human mind.
Portal Two: Mass Psychology—The Crowd’s Contradiction
Markets are not machines—they are living, breathing collectives, governed by fear, greed, hope, and regret. Mass psychology is the gravitational field that bends every price chart, the invisible hand that pushes markets to extremes.
Bull markets end not in panic, but in euphoria. The roaring twenties of the 1920s, the dot-com delirium of 1999, the housing bubble of 2007—each ended with a crescendo of optimism. The masses, finally convinced that risk was dead, piled in. The result? Collapse.
But when the crowd is fearful—when trade wars dominate headlines, tariffs threaten global commerce, and talking heads predict recession—this is when opportunity blooms. The crowd is always wrong at the extremes. Just as they sell bottoms in despair, they buy tops in ecstasy.
Example: In late 2018, as the S&P 500 dropped nearly 20%, sentiment surveys reached multi-year bearish lows. Headlines screamed about tariffs, interest rates, and the end of the cycle. Yet by January 2019, the market reversed violently upward—because the crowd’s capitulation had set the stage for the next advance.
Mass psychology isn’t just a curiosity; it’s the air the market breathes. The nervous crowd isn’t a warning of doom—it’s a signal that the bull is merely hiding, not dead.
Portal Three: Cognitive Bias—The Mind’s Saboteur
If mass psychology is the crowd’s delusion, cognitive bias is the individual’s trap. Every investor carries a toolkit of mental shortcuts—heuristics—that served humanity well on the savannah but wreak havoc in the market.
Examples:
- Recency Bias: Investors tend to expect recent trends to continue, leading them to panic-sell at lows and chase at highs. After March 2020, many refused to believe in the new bull, scarred by the crash, they missed the bounce.
- Confirmation Bias: Investors seek only information that supports their beliefs. If you’re sure the bull is over, you’ll ignore every sign of reversal and fixate on the negatives.
- Loss Aversion: People fear losses twice as much as they value gains. This makes them sell winners too soon and hold losers too long, amplifying volatility at turning points.
These biases don’t just affect individuals—when multiplied across millions, they create the very extremes that technical and mass psychology feed on.
Case Study:
After the 2008 crisis, investors remained haunted by the specter of collapse for years. Every dip was seen as the start of another meltdown. This persistent pessimism kept many sidelined during one of the greatest bull runs in history.
Portal Four: Fusion—When Psychology, Bias, and Technicals Collide
It’s not enough to analyze these forces in isolation. The true edge emerges when you fuse them, reading where their vectors cross and combust. When technicals signal exhaustion, mass psychology screams fear, and cognitive bias pushes the crowd to the exits—that’s the moment when the market, paradoxically, is safest for the patient contrarian.
2020 Pandemic Crash:
- Technicals: All indicators oversold, historic volume, volatility off the charts.
- Mass Psychology: Universal panic, “unprecedented” repeated in every headline.
- Cognitive Bias: Recency bias at full tilt—everyone expected a new Great Depression.
Result? The fastest bull market in history erupted, catching even seasoned professionals flat-footed. Those who fused all three dimensions saw the setup for what it was: a temporary bear, not the end of the world.
Dot-Com Bust (2000):
- Technicals: Divergences everywhere as the Nasdaq peaked and rolled over.
- Mass Psychology: Euphoria, day-trading mania, “this time it’s different.”
- Cognitive Bias: Confirmation bias—everyone found reasons to justify insane valuations.
Result? Catastrophe. The bull died, not with fear, but with unchecked confidence.
Post-2008 Recovery:
- Technicals: Higher lows, breakouts on volume.
- Mass Psychology: Reluctant, scarred, doubting every rally.
- Cognitive Bias: Loss aversion—cash hoarded, stocks avoided.
Result? Relentless, decade-long bull market.
Portal Five: The Vector Reality—Bull Markets Are Never Truly Over
To ask “Is the Bull Market Over?” is to ask the wrong question, or at least to ask it with the wrong sense of time. Markets are not clocks—they are storms, shaped by shifting winds. Every bear market is a vortex, pulling in fear, flushing out weak hands, and fertilising the ground for the next advance.
Vector Analysis:
- Every market move is a force—direction and magnitude.
- Bear markets are not endpoints, but inflexion points where new bull markets are seeded.
- Sometimes, these transitions are violent—2009, 2020. Other times, they simmer—2011, 2016—building pressure before exploding upward.
- Long-term investors who understand this ride the vectors, not the headlines.
Example:
- 2011 “Mini-Bear”: The S&P 500 dropped 19.4% on eurozone fears. Sentiment was abysmal, technicals showed oversold conditions. Yet within months, new highs were made.
- 2016 Correction: Brexit, China slowdown, oil crash. Technicals bottomed, sentiment cratered. The next leg of the bull market launched off that fear.
The lesson: Bull markets don’t end because the crowd is scared. They end when the crowd is fearless.
Portal Six: Outliers—The Real Alchemists of Wealth
The greatest fortunes are made by those who operate at the boundaries, not the center. Outliers—those who see the crowd’s fear as opportunity, who recognise the interplay of technical, psychological, and behavioural forces—are the market’s true alchemists.
They don’t buy when it feels good; they buy when it feels impossible. They don’t wait for “confirmation” from the mainstream; they act when the vectors align—even if it means standing alone.
Examples of Outlier Moves:
- Warren Buffett buying Goldman Sachs in 2008, when the world was on fire.
- Paul Tudor Jones loading up on stocks in March 2020, seeing the technical exhaustion and mass panic as a launchpad, not a grave.
- Individual investors who bought Amazon, Apple, or Microsoft in bear markets when the crowd saw only risk.
These moves weren’t guesses—they were the product of fusing technicals, mass psychology, and an awareness of cognitive bias.
Vortex: Synthesis Without Summary
Here, in the eye of the storm, the question is not whether the bull market is over, but what happens when you see through the illusion of endings at all. The crowd will always be scared by uncertainty, paralysed by headlines, and ready to sell at the bottom. The outlier will see the vectors align—technical exhaustion, psychological panic, and bias-driven mispricing—and step in while others run.
The market isn’t a story with clean chapters—it’s a spiral. Bulls birth bears, bears birth bulls. Chaos feeds order, order decays into chaos. The edge isn’t found in comfort, but in staring straight into the storm. There’s no final answer—only the next one. And the point? Be ready to spot the next bull before fear freezes you in place.
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