From awealthofcommonsense.com/2026/07/i…

The average drawdown for the S&P 500 in those instances was -20%. The average peak-to-trough decline took 193 days. So that doesn’t sound like the end of the world. However, that’s just the peak-to-trough drawdown. Even though stocks bottom at that point and begin moving higher, you would still be underwater. The average number of days it has taken to breakeven during these corrections is 306 days. Put it all together and that’s nearly 500 days in a drawdown while waiting for new highs again. And that’s just the average.

The average drawdown is much steeper and it takes much longer to bottom. It can also take a lot longer to reach new highs again. It took almost 6 years to breakeven following the 1973-74 bear market. The dot-com bust took four-and-a-half years to recover from the bottom. The Great Financial Crisis peak was in the fall of 2007. New highs weren’t breached again until 2013.