Ben Carlson

We go in.

You saw it last year during the Liberation Day thing where the S&P fell almost 20%.

In April, a ton of money poured in.

It's funny.

They've been beat over the head for so many years and decades of people telling them and people like you at The Motley Fool and there's people like me in a blog, hey, when stocks go down, you don't run out of the store because they're on sale.

You rush in to buy.

And it seems like people have actually learned.

And so I make the case all the time that I think investor behavior has actually gotten better over time.

think i think people are becoming better investors especially individuals mom and pop forever was this nomenclature used to talk about an unsophisticated investor right oh they're diy mom and pop retail investor we're the pros we know what we're doing if anything it's that's changed the smart money i think now resides in retail in a lot of ways but i think there are a lot of new investors who haven't experienced an extended bear market 2022 was kind of a decent run-of-the-mill bear market we're down 25 and it lasted a year and a half to get back to the highs whatever but i

I think this extended drawn out where you have all these dead cat bounces and it feels painful and you're down 35%, 40%, there are a lot of investors that haven't experienced that.

I think you see what happens when people run out of dry powder.

Wait a minute, I bought all the dips, now it's dipping again.

Now what do I do?

I think that's an interesting scenario to think about when we have an actual recession.

We haven't had a real recession in 17 years.

We had that one-month period in COVID, which was essentially man-made.

We turned Nintendo off, blew on the cartridge, put it back in, turned it back on again, and we threw a bunch of money at it.

So that wasn't really a real recession, even though unemployment went up.

So I think that's going to be interesting to see.

I don't know what the psychology will be for people when we have a real recession and a real drawn-out bear market.