(Bloomberg View) -- Great bull markets are the easiest timefor money managers, right? Actually, not for most professionals,who are generally most comfortable looking for -- and finding --value in times of stress.

In reality, the current environment poses a big psychologicalquandary. It seems like all you need to do to be successful is justbuy any stock, because it will inevitably go up. Buy high nowand sell higher later.

The truth is, smart investors don’t trade to maximize expectedvalue; they trade to minimize regret.

There is nothing worse than “buying the high” and then watchingthe market trade lower. You feel shame because you know you're thepatsy.

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Here's another dilemma: The masses tend to be fooled by theoptical illusion inherent in charts. A graph showing the S&P500 Index bumping up against the top of the screen gives theappearance that the index can’t go any higher.

Convincing yourself to buy when the chart ends in the upperright-hand corner is a lot harder than it seems. If you hadthe ability to scale the Y-axis out about 50 percent, you'dprobably be more bullish.

So the “smart money” crowd, which has been made to look veryfoolish the last two years, is plagued with self-doubt and adistrust of anything that appears to be easy money. There issomething about being a professional investor and believing thatmaking money should never be easy. If it isn’t hard, it isn’t worthdoing.

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But there are long stretches where investing should be easy and"buy and hold" works. Why make it hard? Stocks usually go up, andeven when they don’t, it is usually a good opportunity to buy morestocks.

Of course, there are plenty of institutions that tend toovercomplicate things a bit, such as hedge funds. Yes, they havedifferent goals, namely to provide good absolute returns in allmarket environments.

But bull markets are torture for most hedge fund managersbecause nobody is really satisfied with an 8 percent return. Itseems people today aren’t even satisfied with a 9,000 percentreturn, like they were getting with the cryptocurrency Ethereumuntil recently.

This is also when hedge funds get a lot of criticism for notoutperforming the indexes. The times when hedge funds do outperformtend to coincide with bear markets, one of the few periods thatpeople are satisfied with active management -- but only alittle.

It’s not fair, though, to compare hedge fund returns with indexreturns because they are different strategies. Hedge funds aresupposed to help minimize risk, but the comparisons are especiallypainful now because the index goes up a little bit each day andseemingly never goes down -- just like how a hedge fund is supposedto perform.

And it does so on the back of “dumb” stocks such as the FANGsthat are favored by retail investors, which means you either haveto own the dumb stocks or underperform.

Hedge fund managers are praying out loud for the market toreturn to “normal,” which is more or less praying for a bear market-- or at least an environment where valuations begin to “makesense.” These people attract a lot of scorn because valuationsdon’t seem to matter much anymore. They are told that markets go upover time, so stop worrying and learn to love the bull.

The fact is, some people are just better at trading in bearmarkets. It’s not a moral issue; bearish investors aren’t badpeople. People just have different skills.

I consider myself to be one of those bear market investors. Istarted working in the capital markets in late 1999, and I startedtaking real risk in 2001. So, you can say I was “born” in a bearmarket -- one that lasted almost three years -- which has coloredmy thinking ever since.

It’s a bit like people who grew up during the Great Depression.They tend to be pretty good at saving money. I made money in thelast two bear markets and I tried to get by in between.

And that’s what most hedge fund managers are trying to do rightnow -- just get by, perhaps by buying some of the stupid stuff (OK,maybe not the really stupid stuff) and just try to ride things outuntil sanity is restored. But how long can that last?

I thought things were pretty stupid six months ago. They aretwice as stupid today.

But I realize it’s kind of hard to have a bear market wheninterest rates are still at emergency levels. So, you can onlyunderperform for so long before your investors lose patience andyank their assets.

The only solution is to have a group of investors who havebought in to your investment philosophy, but it’s hard to stick toprinciples when FOMO kicks in.

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