"But there's a serious question here: The metaphors that are used for describing market trends are bizarrely elaborate, compelling, and contradictory. On the one hand, a stock index is like a climber subject to gravity: It "slips" or "falls", it "climbs" and "slips back" or "sinks", it "claws back" its losses, or is subject to "corrections", it "soars" unless it is "weighed down" by bad news, in which case it might "dip" or "plunge". (I'm sure there are lots more colourful words that I'm not thinking of now. In German I've seen reference to a "Borsentalfahrt". And at least the stock market is springy -- after it crashes, it tends to "bounce".) So, the gravity metaphor suggests that the natural tendency of markets is to go down, even"crash"."