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So forecasting it's, always tricky. And, every year at year end, people are prone to want to ask, "What do you see for the year ahead?" And I think it's going to be a pretty good year. It may be the last pretty good year of this, what I consider to be very long bull market, or it may not. One of the things that we've done in our analysis, my analysis of what went on in 2020–necessary to review the year–but we saw real time as it was happening, is that we recognize that bear market as technically a bear market, because it was big enough in its magnitude drop to qualify as a bear market by the standards by which bear markets are measured, but it was so short and driven by such different features than traditional bear markets that it actually acted in almost every respect, more like a significantly– maybe hugely oversized–market correction in a typical V pattern then in a normal bear market does.
A normal bear market starts off gently, rolls along for a long time with some volatility, cascades in the back one third of its duration to generate two thirds of the drop of the total peak to trough decline and precedes a global economic recession of a relatively normal type that is centered around overcoming and rectifying prior cycle excesses of one form or another.
This one was none of that. This one was the fastest bear market on all time high in history, by any measure. It was driven by the market needing to pre-price super fast what would soon be governmental lockdowns all over the world to fight COVID and you know that, and literally in this drop from February to March 23rd, did not do what most bear markets normally do, which is to take more marginal companies as stocks and grind them slowly into the ground.
Instead on the way down, growth did better than value, big did better than small. And in the initial bounce off the bottom, growth did better than value and big did better than small, which does not happen when new bull markets begin. And in that, we've continued to see as in the period since then growth overall time, better than value, even though much of the media tells you and wrongly, that value is doing better than growth now.
They kind of got that wrong, once they got the story wrong, they never quite got it right. But the fact is, that this market has acted off the bottom. More like the reaction after a correction, late in a bull market, even though it was technically a bear market, then normal bear markets really act then real bear markets really act.
And so the markets and the economy are more like, acting like, because this did not correct prior excesses, this did not have the normal patterns. It's acting more like an extension of the very long bull market that we've had since March, 2009. And in that, as we look forward, we expect to see this process of sentiment continuing to improve.
Once sentiment in the last third of a bull market starts accelerating, which it clearly has, it tends to do that for a good long time. And that's what we're seeing right now that some people are confusing with extent euphoria. We're moving toward euphoria, we haven't gotten there yet. And the last years of bull markets are often accelerating and very powerfully positive.
We're looking at the first year of a president's term where a Democrat has won and taken the house and the Senate. The reality is, that there's only one negative first year of a president's term, since, World War II And that was Jimmy Carter's first year, which was only a negative 7.4%. In the rest of the years, they're all double digit positive.
People fear, business oriented folk and investors often being more leaning to the right and leaning to the left, tend to often fear the incoming Democrat. And then the incoming Democrat has trouble getting as much of what he wanted to do as president through congresses, as people might've thought. And that effect becomes a positive surprise in the inaugural year.
In the first and second years of presidents terms, returns are typically much more varied than in the third and fourth years of presidents terms, but when they're not negative, they've been hugely positive. And I don't think this is going to be a negative year, therefore it should be a good strong year.
The fact is, that that improving sentiment continues for a good long time. Even after you get to euphoria, the bull market continues for a reasonable period of time. How long, too early to tell, but looking at when we started to warm up in sentiment, which is in the back half of 2020, we ought to be seeing sentiment improving irregularly through the end of 2021 and that gets us into 2022.
And I never make projections or forecast more than about a year at a time, but there should be a pretty good year. You should enjoy it. You should not let yourself get too frightened by the things that appear to be Bubblicious and overly good. It's a time to get more careful and not let yourself be chasing heat and overly greedy, but you do want to stay in the market and enjoy this good time. Subscribe to the Fisher Investments .
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