Buy-and-hold investors obviously don't like bear markets. What if, instead of being guided by their fears of a bear market, investors forced themselves to view a bear market as the long-term buying opportunity that it is? We never know exactly how long they're going to last, or how deep they're going to cut, after all. It's not this profile of the typical bear market that makes them somewhat easier to face, however. See, once they're over, it only takes around two years to recover all the value that was lost during and because of that bear market.