There's never a bad time to start investing, but the tail end of 2021 was the worst time to begin putting your money to work in the stock market that nearly any of us can remember. Soaring interest rates and fear of a recession that those higher rates could cause have weighed heavily on stock prices across the board. In the first half of 2022, the benchmark S&P 500 index suffered its worst first-half loss since 1970.

When markets fall, they tend to come crashing down relatively quickly. The important thing to remember at times like these is that every bear market in history has been wiped away by a much longer recovery period.

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Source Fool.com