Over the past year we have made about $213B in realized losses, this compares to realized gains of $455B during the 2021 bull run. Was this really that brutal of a bear market?

Surely this past year has been not-so-good for many of us and we have seen throughout the year that there were a ton of liquidation events caused by mostly black swan events. Like we had LUNA making a drop from $40k to $30k (even more on intraday) or then the contagion of that fall with the bankruptcy of companies like 3AC or Celsius. All of those events caused the majority of us to be in losses and while many hold on to their bag in the hope of a recovery, some do sell at losses.

Over the whole year of 2022 there were $213B in realized losses, that a really huge number if you think about it. But if we do compare this to the gains people made in the bull market before that, there were a massive $455B, which is literally double of the losses we made this bear market. So was this bear market not so bad after all? Lets look at a chart to this:

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Graph from Glassnode

As we can see, this is not just a one-off scenario. In the 2018 bear market and the prior bull market it has been exactly the same. We had $117B in realized gains during the peak and then half of that in as realized losses in the bear market.

Many here seem to think that this bear market possibly erased all the gains of the bull market and was kind of “stronger“ but that is not true. The bull market was still massive if put into perspektive and its obvious that we would have a bear market to correct from possibly unsustainable levels and cleanse some scams.