By Staff Reporters

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A correction is a decline of 10 percent or more from an asset’s most recent high. For a stock that recently reached an all-time high of $100 per share, a correction would occur if the stock fell to $90 or lower. Corrections can happen in any financial asset such as individual stocks, broad market indexes like the S&P 500 or commodities. The S&P 500 fell below 4,336 in January 2022, marking a more than 10 percent decline from its high earlier in the year.

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Corrections can be caused by a number of different factors and they’re difficult, if not impossible, to predict ahead of time. Short-term concerns about economic growth, Federal Reserve policy, political issues or even a new variant of the COVID-19 virus all have the potential to trigger market corrections. These issues make investors fearful that their prior assumptions about the future might not be correct. When people are fearful, they typically look to sell stocks in favor of assets considered safer such as U.S. Treasury bonds.

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Difference between a correction and a crash

A stock-market correction may sound similar to a crash, but there are some key distinctions between the two. A crash is a sharp drop in share prices, typically a double-digit percentage decline, over the course of just a few days. A correction tends to happen at a slower pace, therefore making the drop less steep than a crash would be. One of the most famous stock-market crashes happened in October 1987, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 22.6 percent in a single day that became historically known as Black Monday.

Corrections are more subtle and are sometimes even thought to be healthy for rising markets because they help things from becoming overheated. Like their name suggests, they correct prices back down from a slightly elevated level.

Difference between a correction and a bear market

The difference between a correction and a bear market is in the magnitude of the decline. A correction is a decline of at least 10 percent, but less than 20 percent, while a bear market begins at a decline of at least 20 percent from a recent peak. Bear markets also tend to last longer than corrections because they tend to reflect an economic reality, such as a recession, rather than a short-term concern that may or may not materialize. The challenge for investors is that it’s very difficult to determine in real time whether a market is just in a correction or if it could become a bear market.

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MORE: https://www.merrilledge.com/article/how-weather-stock-market-correction

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