Bull market vs bear market
A bull market is a sustained period of rising prices and rising confidence. A bear market is the opposite: a sustained decline accompanied by falling participation. The conventional dividing line in traditional finance is a 20% move from a recent extreme, so a fall of more than 20% from a high marks a bear market and a rise of more than 20% from a low marks a bull.
In crypto that 20% rule is close to useless, because Bitcoin can move 20% in a fortnight without changing regime at all. Which is why definitions here tend to rely on a basket of conditions rather than a single percentage.
Right now
Not a bull market yetWhere the terms come from
The usual explanation is that a bull attacks by thrusting its horns upward while a bear swipes downward, so the animals came to stand for rising and falling markets. The etymology is disputed and probably tidied up after the fact, but the usage has been standard in English-language markets for well over two centuries.
The 20% convention is more recent and entirely arbitrary. Nobody legislated it. It stuck because it is a round number that roughly separates ordinary corrections from regime changes in equity markets.
Why 20% does not work for crypto
Bitcoin routinely falls 20% to 30% inside runs that everyone agrees were bull markets, and it has staged rallies of 40% or more inside bear markets that went on to make new lows. A rule that flips several times a year describes volatility, not regime.
The practical alternative is to ask whether the conditions that accompany a bull market are present together: is price above its long-term trend, is money entering through ETFs and stablecoins, is sentiment on the greed side, is on-chain activity growing, is retail paying attention. Any one can mislead. Several at once is harder to fake.
How to tell which one you are in
The honest answer is that you cannot know in real time with certainty, only weigh evidence. Tops and bottoms are obvious afterwards and contested while they happen.
What you can do is fix your criteria in advance, apply them mechanically and look at all of them at once. That removes the biggest failure mode, which is deciding what a bull market is after you already have a view on where the price is going.
This site does that with 15 signals and a strict majority rule. A tie is not a bull market, and if a data source fails, that signal is excluded rather than counted against the market. Every threshold is published so you can disagree with a specific number rather than the conclusion.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between a bull and bear market?
A bull market is a sustained rise in prices with growing participation and risk appetite. A bear market is a sustained fall with shrinking participation. The conventional threshold is a 20% move from a recent high or low, though that rule fits equities far better than crypto.
Is a 20% drop a bear market in crypto?
Not usefully. Bitcoin has fallen 20% or more inside periods that were clearly bull markets, and rallied further than that inside bear markets. Judging the regime needs several independent conditions rather than one percentage.
What is a bear market rally?
A sharp rise inside an ongoing downtrend that fails before reaching a new high. They are common in crypto and are the main reason a single momentum reading is a weak signal on its own.
How do I know if it is a bull market right now?
Check conditions rather than the calendar or a single price move. The live tracker on this site scores 15 signals hourly and gives a yes or no answer with the reasoning shown.