It's "official" now.

With the price losses on Monday, the most important stock indices in the euro area are now in a bear market.

According to a common definition, this is when prices have fallen by 20 percent from the most recent high.

Admittedly a pragmatic and rather vague definition.

But other conditions are also met, such as that two-thirds of the price loss must have occurred in the last third of the period.

Martin Hock

Editor in Business.

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The Dax has fallen by almost 22 percent since the most recent high on January 5th.

The French CAC 40 index is only doing a little better, and has lost around 20 percent since then.

For the Euro Stoxx 50, the bear market technically already began in November with a similarly high price drop, for the market-wide FAZ index even in August.

Accordingly, the index is already almost 25 percent in the red and had already formed the bear market last week.

Currently, the bear market is mainly concentrated in the regions that are geographically and politically closest to the conflict, especially the euro area.

Japan's Nikkei index has yet to break bear market territory, down 18 percent since September.

For the American S&P 500, but also the British FTSE 100, the minus is just under 10 percent.

"Basically, the further a company is geographically from Ukraine, the better," says Marcus Poppe, co-fund manager of DWS Top Dividende and fund manager of DWS Invest Smart Industrial Technologies.

In his view, the central banks are likely to be more cautious about raising interest rates than expected before the war began.

Technology stocks in the US benefited from this.

Commodity exporter Canada is proving to be even more resilient.

Its leading stock exchange is 20 percent above the pre-Covid level and close to the record high.

"Commodity titles such as gold mine operators are benefiting from the rising prices," explains the fund manager.

Aside from geopolitics, the ECB meeting is the most important event this week, according to Unicredit.

The central bank will make market participants aware that it is ready to act in a considered manner.

In an environment where risk symmetry could change at any time, it remains to be seen whether this will be enough to stabilize the markets.

In the past 50 years, there have been arithmetically 17 bear markets on the German stock market.

Most of these lasted one to two years, only one almost three years from April 1964 to January 1967, a few were shorter.

This also includes the bear market of the corona crisis in March 2020, which only lasted 28 calendar days.

The price drop was correspondingly atypically strong at the time.

If you exclude the shorter bear mark, the daily price loss is between 0.05 and 0.3 percent.

What sounds like little added up to an overall loss of 57 percent.