the current bear market may be painful but history indicates it may need to fall further to clear the way for a meaningful recovery said analysts at jefferies stocks have bounced modestly in july but remain down sharply for the year to date the sp 500 spx entered a bear market in june marking a 20 decline from its early january record close the largecap benchmark remains down more than 19 for the year to date while the nasdaq composite comp has declined more than 27 and the dow jones industrial average djia has shed 14 “while there isn’t really a point to reiterating how painful yeartodate price action has been we did think that it would be worthwhile to reiterate how it stacks up historically not terribly deep and still shortlived” the analysts said in a saturday note “for example while the current drawdown is deeper than the one we saw in ’18 it’s still several weeks shorter notably for sp 500 bear markets that didn’t reach 25 the average amount of days until the next alltimehigh was 568 trading days…far more than the current duration of 131 days” they said “so despite extremely low sentiment readings we are still churning around ‘no man’s land’” see chart below the june consumerprice index came in hot last wednesday with the yearoveryear increase of 91 reaching a 41year high as gasoline prices surged data on friday showed us consumers boosted retail spending in june by a solid 1 in light of the stickier inflation and uncertain economic forecasts according to jefferies the markets found a way to digest the massive inflation reading and corporate earnings but the fact that consumers and companies haven’t acted like a recession is near could prolong the current market dynamic the june quarter reporting season is entering its second week with goldman sachs gs posting a strongerthanexpected profit this morning yet its earnings fell from a year ago bank of america corp bac  along with other wall street megabanks such as wells fargo  co wfc and jp morgan chase jpm fell short of analyst expectations read more the stock market’s next big rally might just be a bear in bull’s clothing “2q sales guidance changes look even more normal from the historical perspective with just 39 of companies who have issued a tweak making it a decrease” wrote andrew greenebaum at jefferies’ equity product management in the report see chart “given still strong consumption and the difficult cost environment the dichotomy between the top and bottom lines makes some sense but it also highlights the fact that we haven’t really seen the type of pervasive lack of optimism on the corporate side that typically provides a proper reset for stocks” “and while market participants may be tiring of the prolonged plunge it actually hasn’t been either very long nor remarkably deep” according to greenebaum “we last made a new high 131 days ago and even the 2h18 slide lasted 145 sessions as we suggested when we first offered the analysis in may the sp may need to break down substantially further to actually spark a real recovery trade no matter the recession timing” read more stock investors are still in danger but history says bear markets are relatively brief