Index Market - Bear Market Rallies How Sustainable are they?

I had raised a question in my previous post that do, Do bear markets end in a V Shaped recovery. The weight of evidence suggests otherwise, and hence the rally that we saw a couple of days back just fizzled out and we are again at new lows. Another interesting point I came to know, is that bear markets usually see the highest daily gain rallies in absolute and percentage terms. This is a peculiar characteristic of the bear market. And we indeed saw the other day dow gaining the maximum points in a single day. . .

However what is disconcerting is the fact that bear markets take a long time to go away and intermittent periods are marked by rallies that are 'fake'. I use the word 'fake' because these rallies are sharp upmoves and they show promise that the bull market is back, however the only thing that they end up achieving is lower bottoms. These rallies fizzle out after 'luring' the small investor only to end up in an even more severe downmove.

There is empirical evidence to show that in the great fall of 1929, markets went up 3-4 times till 1932, in rallies that were as high as 40%, yet every time in those 3-4 times, the markets made newer bottoms, and this continued till 1932, infact there were 6 false bottoms that were made before the final bottom came at 80% off the highs!!! And not only that it took the markets until 1954 to come back to the highs of 1929!!! But then that was the great depression, we are no where near a depression, infact we are not even in a recession....and as the common saying goes,

'when your neighbout loses his job, its recession...when you lose your job, its depression'

So where do we go from here, seeing the technical parameters, we are nearing a rally or a bounceback from these levels, the bounceback might come soon (if we have a sharp fall of lets say 600-1000 points in a couple of days) or it might come after 3-4 days of slow grinding down, or it might come even without any of these happening...but the point is that we will not see for sure a downturn without going up! My worry more is that how long will this rally sustain and more importantly will we fall further like the bear market rallies do!

If we go by the historical bear markets, they tend to last anywhere between 18-36 months, and we are still only 10 months into it ...and thats not comforting news...lets hope that our earnings growths will take us higher...