No one is certain where the terms bull market and bear market, for a rising and a falling market respectively, came from. The most popular theory is that the bear market originally referred to middlemen in the fur trade, who would buy and sell bearskins before the bears had been caught a practice even more financially hazardous than counting your chickens before theyre hatched. A proverb about bear-jobbers was current as early as the seventeenth century. The term bear for stock buyers who expected prices to fall became common during the 1720s South Sea Bubble scandal in England.