A bull market describes a sustained period of rising prices across a broad market or index, generally accompanied by investor optimism, while a bear market describes the opposite — a sustained period of falling prices, commonly defined as a decline of roughly 20% or more from a recent high. Both terms describe the overall market or a broad index, such as the FTSE Bursa Malaysia KLCI, rather than any single stock. There’s no single official body that declares when a bull or bear market begins or ends, and the labels are typically only confirmed in hindsight once a trend has clearly played out over weeks or months — a sharp short-term drop doesn’t automatically mean a bear market has started, and a brief rally doesn’t confirm a bull market either. The terms are useful shorthand for describing market conditions after the fact, but they aren’t reliable predictors of what happens next.