The most direct way to understand stock market pullbacks is to define market highs in some way and then analyze what happens after price drops a certain amount from these highs. Let’s look at what the S&P 500 tracking stock (SPY) did after declining from notable highs over the past 10 years. Fairly consistent patterns appeared following nearly all types of pullbacks in daily price data from June 2, 1997 to May 31, 2007.