Bull Market
A bull market is a stretch of time during which prices for an asset, or a whole market like the S&P 500, are broadly trending upward. The name comes from the way a bull attacks — thrusting its horns up — as a visual shorthand for rising prices, and the opposite case (falling prices) is called a bear market, from a bear swiping its paw downward.
There's no single moment that flips a market into "bull" status; it's a description applied after prices have climbed meaningfully off a low point and kept grinding higher over weeks, months, or years, usually alongside general optimism, rising trading volumes, and improving economic conditions. Some commentators use a rough rule of thumb, like a 20% rise from a recent low, to label a bull market, but that number is a convention people use for talking about markets, not a rule any exchange or regulator enforces.
The nuance that trips people up is that a bull market doesn't mean prices only go up. Sharp pullbacks of several percent, even ones lasting weeks, can happen inside a bull market and not end it, as long as the overall upward trend resumes. Conversely, calling something a bull market is a judgment about a completed or ongoing trend, not a prediction — plenty of people confidently label a bull market right before it stalls.
The term can apply narrowly (a bull market in oil, or in a single stock) or broadly (a bull market in equities generally), so it's worth checking what scope someone means when they use it.
This term depends on a rule or threshold that changes over time, so no specific figure is quoted here. The definition mentions a common '20% rise from a low' convention for labeling a bull market. This is a widely used market-commentary convention, not a codified regulatory or exchange rule, and different sources apply it differently (some measure from a low, some require it to follow a prior 20% decline). A human editor should confirm how TrueTrader wants to characterize this threshold, or omit a specific number if precision is required.
Day traders care because the broader trend (bull or bear) shapes which side of trades tends to have better odds and lower resistance on a given day, and many day traders skew toward taking long trades that align with a bull market's direction rather than fighting it.
Suppose an index fund tracking a broad stock market drops to $300 a share during a downturn, then over the following two years climbs steadily to $370, with occasional dips of 5-8% along the way that each get bought back up. Financial commentators would describe that stretch as a bull market, even though it wasn't a straight line up.
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