Today on Money Matters Monday, Bigelow returned to talk not about financial formulas, but about fear and greed, the two emotions he says truly move markets.

“Fear is tied to bear markets,” Barry explained. “When prices fall, people sell off. Greed, on the other hand, fuels bull markets. Nobody wants to miss out when the market is rising.”

To help people remember, he offered a simple image: “Bears’ claws go down, that’s a bear market. Bulls’ horns go up, that’s a bull market.”

But Bigelow warns that the real danger lies in what he calls the herd mentality. “We all have this psychological bias,” he said. “If the market is going up, we want in. If it’s dropping, we want out, because we think someone knows something we don’t.”

He points to the dot-com bubble as a prime example. “People were buying stocks of companies that didn’t even have revenue,” Barry said. “Just because they ended in ‘.com’. Even Apple’s stock fell, not because of performance, but because it was a tech stock in a panicked market.”

It’s a powerful reminder that sometimes, the numbers don’t lie, but we stop listening.

As Barry put it, “This is the mind behind the money. And if you don’t understand the psychology, you don’t fully understand the market.”