Healthy Correction or the Beginning of a Bear Market?

“Is this a correction or the start of a bear market?”
Wrong question.

What we’re seeing is volatility born from a market structure that isn’t built like the old one. The dynamics have changed — full stop.

1. AI-driven strategies are crowding the same trades.
When half the market is reacting to similar signals, you get synchronized surges and synchronized pukes. It’s not 2008, it’s not 2020 — it’s AI feedback loops.

2. Private credit is now a shadow central bank.
Money isn’t flowing through the same pipes. Leverage, risk, and “liquidity” are being created off-exchange, which means stress shows up in weird places and at weird times.

3. Retail is no longer small.
Retail isn’t the sideshow. It’s a real flow factor — chaotic, opinionated, overleveraged, and occasionally right as hell. That alone makes swings sharper and reversals faster.
So what does that mean for this pullback?
It’s not a healthy correction or a baby bear.
It’s the market trying to price things in a world where the drivers are new, the players are louder, and the feedback loops are violent.
Volatility is the feature — not the warning siren.

My stance:
“We’re in a structurally different market. Expect struggle, expect whip, expect overreactions — and trade the environment we actually have, not the one people wish still existed.”