“Every bull market since World War II has had at least one correction—a 10 percent drop, not a 20 percent drop,” said Jon Chambers, vice president of Schultz Collins Lawson Chambers, a San Francisco investment consulting firm that primarily works with institutional retirement plans. “It would be rational to assume that (the recent drop signals) a correction, without meaning that the bull market is over.”

Chambers disagrees with the basic concept of characterizing a market as a bull or bear.

“People want to give the market characteristics of a thinking, sentient being, but really a market is more of a collective,” he said. “Markets aren’t bulls or bears. They’re more like jellyfish: collectives of organisms that come together and act as a cohesive unit, but each part is really independent. Like jellyfish, markets can stink from time to time.”

So why is the market reeking to high heaven?

“It’s been anxious market,” Chambers said. “There are lot of things to be anxious about recently, (such as) rising oil prices (and) the results of the presidential election. The market doesn’t like uncertainty.”