Bear markets: Investors don’t like them, but understandably so. Not only do they last roughly a (miserable) year, on average, but numbers from Stifel suggest that since 1932, the average bear market has dragged the S&P 500 (^GSPC +0.62%) down 35% from peak to trough. Yikes.

Yet experienced investors know they’re going to happen sooner or later — once about every five years (again, on average), though certainly not with anywhere near that predictable a cadence. Regardless, it’s tempting to try to simply sidestep bear markets by being out of the market altogether when they happen.

For the vast majority of investors, though, such a strategy may end up doing more harm than good. Here’s why.

A long-term struggle is won with just a few major victories … which you’ll never actually see coming

From a distance, it often looks like the stock market makes enough sense to actively navigate it. As veteran investors can attest, however, that’s not the case once you’re in it. It’s unpredictable from one day to the next. The only way to win is by not trying to predict the near-term ebb and flow. You have to think long-term, when stocks’ values become much clearer.

But ironically, most investors’ total long-term gains ultimately stem from a relatively small number of single-day gains.

Data from mutual fund company Hartford puts things in perspective: The growth of a $10,000 investment made in an S&P 500 index fund in 1996 would be worth more than $192,000 by 2025, if you had simply left it alone that whole time. Not bad. However, even if you’d just stayed out of the market for its best 10 days during this period, your investment would have only grown to a little over $85,000. That’s less than half of what you’d have by just doing nothing.

Here’s the rub: Since 1996, nearly half of the market’s very best one-day gains happened during a bear market, when few people would have been willing to even entertain the idea of jumping back in for a big one-day score. Never mind the unlikelihood of knowing when those single-day surges might materialize.

But will avoiding the really bad days that tend to take shape during bear markets offset the downside of missing out on the dramatically bullish ones? Even if you could successfully predict them ahead of time — which you can’t — there may be little benefit in doing so. Based on data from Morningstar, wealth management firm Smith+Howard reports that between 1950 and 2020, most of the S&P 500’s 15 worst daily losses were more than undone a year later. Specifically, the average daily loss for these 15 days was a stunning 8.8%. However, in all but one case (in 2008), the index was up by double digits within 12 months of that awful day’s close.

Staying ready for the unknown is better than attempting to navigate the known

All of this raises the question: Why do investors try to avoid these steep but usually short-lived setbacks? Though not knowing could prove destructive to your portfolio, the answer might be tough to hear: It’s ego. Market-timers believe they can accurately identify the market’s tops and bottoms, but they can’t. The vast majority of the time, the market has a knack for fooling almost everyone.

But there’s good news. Once you accept that there are things you can’t possibly know about the market, managing a portfolio becomes easier — you’ll limit your actions to those you know you can successfully manage.

Chief among these is maintaining a well-diversified portfolio, with many different stocks spanning several sectors. While part of the purpose is to ensure you have some exposure to a bull market’s biggest winners at any given time, there’s upside going the other direction as well. That is, a diversified portfolio is likely to lose less net value overall when a bear market takes hold.

That still isn’t fun. However, it does make it easier to stick with quality stocks when you need to own them most. That’s at the beginning of a new bull market, which no one ever really knows is coming until well after it’s underway. As Hartford Funds highlights, more than one-fourth of the S&P 500’s 50 biggest single-day gains took shape in just the first two months of new bull markets, when most investors are too timid to trust that the market has made its ultimate bottom. Hartford adds that since 1928, new bull markets have gained an average of 13.6% in their first month and more than 25% in their first three months.

Gains (recovered or otherwise) are just too big and too important to risk leaving on the table.

The bottom line: Just stay the course by owning quality stocks worth owning before, during, and after bear markets. Attempting to navigate the market’s unpredictable ebbs and flows has undermined the portfolios of too many investors who were certain that they could do what few people can — but were wrong.

The justices in a 5-4 decision in June said Cook, who was nominated to the Fed’s Board of Governors by President Joe Biden, could remain in her post at least as long as her lawsuit challenging her firing goes on. The Trump administration is appealing a lower-court ruling in Cook’s favor.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a footnote in his opinion that nothing forbids President Donald Trump from “trying again” to fire Cook provided she is given proper notice and a chance to contest it. Trump indicated after the opinion that he would do just that, vowing to “take appropriate action immediately.”

In a letter this week obtained by The Associated Press, White House aide Dan Scavino told Cook that Trump was “considering removing you from your position” but cited the Supreme Court’s requirement of proper notice in giving her until August 26 to challenge it.

The attempt to fire Cook is rooted in a criminal referral made last August by Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, that accused her of committing mortgage fraud by declaring two different homes – one in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and one in Atlanta – as “primary residence.’’ Homebuyers can get lower mortgage rates or smaller down payments on their primary homes compared to second or vacation homes.

Cook has aggressively defended herself against the allegations, saying the president had attempted to oust her “on a manufactured pretext because I refused to bow to political pressure and continued to set interest rates based only on what would best serve the American people.’’

Her lawyer, Abbe Lowell, argued in a November letter that Cook has mostly lived in the Ann Arbor property since first purchasing it in 2005. As a result, it was accurate for her to refer to it as her “primary residence” in a June 2021 application to refinance its mortgage, the letter said.

A month later, she purchased a condominium in Atlanta and, in a July 2021 document, also referred to it as her “primary residence.” Lowell said that it was an “isolated notation” that did not reflect an intent to defraud. An earlier mortgage application to the same lender in May 2021 had referred to the Atlanta condo as a “vacation home,” Lowell said. Cook also referred to it as a second home in federal filings during her confirmation process to become a Fed governor.

The latest White House letter largely rehashes the year-old allegations.

“These allegations are as baseless now as they were a year ago when President Trump tried to remove Governor Cook and interfere with the independence of the Federal Reserve,” Lowell said in a statement.

“No matter what President Trump tries to do next, this much is clear under the facts and Supreme Court precedent — there is no valid cause for removing Governor Cook. As we did before, we will challenge this latest pretext and preserve her position and the historic role of the Fed,” he added.