Bull and Bear cycles, and the Dancing Shiva. What an Ancient God Can Teach Us About Markets
Bull and bear market cycles have shaped investor psychology for centuries. But two bronze animals can only tell half the story. This article explores what the Charging Bull, the Bear, and an ancient Hindu deity standing at the world’s largest particle physics laboratory can teach investors about cycles, patience, and the limits of linear thinking.
Two Animals Cast in Bronze
Walk through the southern tip of Manhattan on a weekday morning, and you will eventually reach Bowling Green, a small, cobblestoned pocket of park at the foot of Broadway. Standing there, muscles tensed, and head lowered, is one of the most photographed sculptures in the world: the Charging Bull.
Most people who photograph it know almost nothing about how it got there. It was not commissioned by the New York Stock Exchange, or by the city, or by any bank. It was an act of what art critics politely call guerrilla installation. In the early hours of 15 December 1989, the Sicilian sculptor Arturo Di Modica backed a truck up to the Stock Exchange on Broad Street, lowered a 3.5-tonne bronze bull onto the pavement beneath the building’s Christmas tree, and drove away. He had spent two years and roughly $350,000 of his own money building it, motivated by a simple idea: after the 1987 Black Monday crash had shaken investor confidence to its core, someone ought to put something hopeful in front of the Stock Exchange. The police removed it within hours. Public outcry returned it within days, to its current home at Bowling Green, where it has stood ever since on a temporary permit that has now lasted more than three decades.
In market language, the bull represents optimism, expansion, and rising prices. The term comes from the way the animal attacks: thrusting its horns upward. The bear, by contrast, swipes downward and has come to represent caution, contraction, and falling prices. Both entered financial vocabulary in eighteenth-century London, and both have been doing symbolic duty ever since.
These two animals dominate the visual language of capital markets. They appear in television graphics, in newspaper headlines, in the iconography of fund managers the world over. And they are useful shorthand. But they are also, in a specific and important sense, incomplete.
Bull and bear market cycles describe motion. What they do not describe is the underlying pattern that generates that motion: the rhythm, the deep structure beneath the price chart. For that, you need a different metaphor entirely. You need to travel from Bowling Green to a quiet square in Geneva.
A God at the Heart of Particle Physics
On 18 June 2004, the Indian government unveiled a gift to CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, whose campus straddles the French-Swiss border near Geneva. The gift was a two-metre bronze statue of the deity Shiva in his form as Nataraja, the Lord of the Dance. It stands in a small square between buildings 39 and 40, not far from the main entrance.
The choice of this image for this location was not arbitrary. CERN exists to study the behaviour of subatomic particles, the fundamental constituents of matter. Its physicists observe and analyse the creation, transformation, and destruction of particles at energies not seen since the earliest moments after the Big Bang. The Nataraja was chosen because, in Hindu philosophy, it depicts this process precisely: creation, preservation, destruction, and renewal, all expressed in a single, continuous act of dance.
The iconography is worth pausing over. Shiva dances within a ring of fire that represents the unbroken cycle of the cosmos. In one hand, he holds a small drum, the damru, whose beat marks the rhythm of creation, the primordial sound from which existence begins. In one hand, he holds a flame, agni, the force of dissolution that clears the way for renewal. One foot pins down Apasmara, a dwarf figure representing ignorance and ego, the forces that cloud understanding. The other foot rises in a gesture of liberation. Every element in the sculpture encodes a relationship between opposing forces held in dynamic balance.
The physicist Fritjof Capra first developed this parallel in 1972, in an article titled ‘The Dance of Shiva: The Hindu View of Matter in the Light of Modern Physics.’ His argument, later expanded in The Tao of Physics (1975), was that modern physics had arrived, through mathematics and experimentation, at an understanding of matter as fundamentally dynamic: not a collection of stable objects, but a web of relationships and processes, continuously transforming. The Nataraja, he argued, had expressed this understanding visually for at least two thousand years. A plaque beside the CERN statue quotes Capra directly: ‘Modern physics has shown that the rhythm of creation and destruction is not only manifest in the turn of the seasons and in the birth and death of all living creatures, but is also the very essence of inorganic matter.’
The statue was made in India by artisans using a technique that dates to the Chola dynasty of the ninth and tenth centuries. A wax model was surrounded by a soil mould. The wax was melted and poured out, and liquid bronze was poured in. Once cooled and polished, it was shipped to Switzerland. It now stands, somewhat incongruously but entirely appropriately, at the frontier of what humanity currently knows about the physical world.
I first encountered this image a few years ago, and it has stayed with me. Not because of any particular interest in Hindu cosmology, but because the underlying idea felt immediately relevant to something I think about constantly: how investors understand time, change, and cycles.
The Investor’s Problem with Straight Lines
One of the most persistent cognitive errors in investing is the tendency to project current conditions forward in a straight line. A rising market becomes, in the investor’s imagination, a market that will continue to rise. A falling market becomes one that will continue to fall. Both assumptions have been reliably expensive throughout financial history.
This is not simply a failure of analysis. It is a failure of the conceptual model. If you understand markets as linear mechanisms, where inputs produce predictable outputs and yesterday’s trend is the best guide to tomorrow’s price, then you will keep being surprised by the turning points. You will buy at peaks, because the evidence up to that point supports optimism. You will sell at troughs, because the recent evidence supports fear. And you will do both at exactly the wrong moment.
The bull and the bear, taken in isolation, reinforce this linear thinking. They describe a direction of travel. They do not describe the transition between directions, which is the part that matters most and is understood least.
What the Nataraja offers is a different frame: cyclical rather than linear, rhythmic rather than directional. In this frame, the question is not ‘which way is the market going?’ but ‘where in the cycle are we?’ Creation, preservation, destruction, renewal. Growth, consolidation, correction, recovery. The dance has no final destination. It has a pattern. If you want a fuller picture of how to read bull and bear market cycles at different levels, I explored four complementary frameworks in 4 Ways to Look at Financial Markets.
Howard Marks has built much of his investment philosophy on precisely this idea. In Mastering the Market Cycles, he argues that markets move in cycles driven by human psychology, and that the most important skill in investing is not forecasting, but understanding where in a cycle you currently stand. Every bull market carries within it the seeds of the next bear. Every crash lays the groundwork for the next recovery. The forces are always both present; what changes is which one currently dominates.
This is the rhythm of the Nataraja applied to capital markets. Creation and destruction are not alternatives. They are the same dance.
What the Three Symbols Say, Together
Taken together, the Charging Bull, the Bear, and the Nataraja form a more complete picture of market dynamics than any one of them offers alone.
The Bull captures the force of expansion: the period when capital is deployed, confidence builds, prices rise, and the economy grows. It is a force that is real and necessary. Without bull markets, wealth is not created at the scale required to fund innovation, infrastructure, and the long-term growth that benefits savers and investors alike.
The Bear captures the force of contraction: the period when excess is repriced, overconfidence is corrected, weak positions are liquidated, and capital is reallocated from poorly conceived investments to more productive ones. It too is real and necessary. Markets without corrections would be markets without price discovery, which is to say they would not be markets at all.
The Nataraja captures the relationship between the two: the underlying rhythm that makes sense of both forces, the dance that neither begins with the bull nor ends with the bear, but moves continuously between them. It represents what Marks calls the cycle, and what most long-term investors eventually learn through hard experience: that the market is not a machine to be predicted, but a living system to be understood.
Carl Sagan, in his television series Cosmos, noted that Hinduism was the only major world religion whose sense of cosmological time scales corresponded to those of modern scientific cosmology: cycles running from days to billions of years, creation and dissolution operating simultaneously at every scale. Whether or not one reads anything theological into that observation, the structural insight is striking. Bull and bear market cycles too operate across multiple time scales simultaneously, with daily fluctuations nested inside monthly trends nested inside multi-year cycles nested inside generational secular shifts. The investor who sees only the daily fluctuation has lost the pattern. The investor who sees only the secular trend may be taking on more near-term risk than they understand.
Composure Is Not Passivity
The practical implication of cyclical thinking is not resignation. It is composure.
Composure means recognising that no bull runs indefinitely, and planning accordingly: not assuming the good times will last forever, not leveraging up at peaks, not treating recent returns as a reliable guide to future ones. Composure also means recognising that no bear lasts eternally, and planning accordingly: maintaining positions through corrections when the underlying investment thesis remains sound, adding to them when prices fall without a corresponding deterioration in fundamentals, resisting the pull of fear at exactly the moment when courage is most productive.
This is not the same as passivity or fatalism. You do not simply watch the market dance and conclude there is nothing to be done. Cyclical thinking generates very specific decisions: what to hold in different phases, how much liquidity to maintain, when to be more defensive and when to be more aggressive. The difference is that these decisions are anchored in an understanding of where you are in the cycle, rather than in a projection of recent trends forward.
There is also, I think, a temperamental dimension worth acknowledging. Some investors are naturally more comfortable with volatility; others are not. Knowing your own temperament is not a concession to weakness. It is the kind of honest self-assessment that good investing requires. A strategy calibrated to your actual psychology will consistently outperform a theoretically optimal strategy that you will abandon the first time markets fall sharply.
Di Modica placed his bull outside the New York Stock Exchange not to celebrate greed, but to assert the persistence of human confidence through adversity. That confidence, grounded in a long-term view of what bull and bear market cycles do over time, is the investor’s most durable asset. The Nataraja, dancing in its ring of fire, says the same thing in a different language: the cycle turns, the rhythm continues, and both creation and destruction are part of the same movement.
A Final Thought
Markets are not mechanisms. They are not linear systems that reward analysis with predictability. They are living systems, shaped by millions of human decisions, by psychology and liquidity and innovation and fear and policy, by forces visible and invisible. Understanding them requires holding multiple time scales in mind simultaneously, resisting the seduction of recent trends, and maintaining enough perspective to see the pattern beneath the noise.
The bull and the bear will keep fighting, as they always have, and investors will keep taking sides. But the wiser ones understand that neither side wins permanently. The dance continues. And the investor who grasps that rhythm, who does not mistake a phase of the bull and bear market cycle for a permanent condition, is already ahead of the majority.
That is not a mystical insight. It is, in the end, the most practical wisdom available.
Keep it real. Sweat Your Ass