At market bottoms, you have a completely different pattern in which the dominate emotion is fear and panic. And what we found at market bottoms, for example, was that in a typical major market bottom, you see a series of 90% downside days, 90% of all the volume, 90% of all the price changes are on the downside. Now the interesting thing that we found was that you can have a whole series of 90% downside days. During the 1973 and 1974 bear market, there were 15 90% downside days.

Over how long a period of time?

Over about 15 or 16 months.

So you don't necessarily buy the first 90% down day.
 
No. And that is the really critical point about market bottoms, is that you can have signs of panic-selling and it doesn't really mean anything. The only thing that will turn a market around and head it higher, is when buyers are wiling to step up to the plate and begin to buy.

The real signal of a major market bottom is to first see a series of 90% downside days, which say, investors are panicking, and in their panic, they are exhausting the desire to sell, because everybody that wanted to sell will have done it. But the key ingredient is to watch for a 90% upside day, indicating the prices have dropped low enough.

So you were saying the first 90% up day is a sign that sentiment has shifted dramatically.

That's right.

And is that a buy signal?

I think the history of this indicator shows that if you were to wait for a series of 90% downside days followed by a 90% upside day and bought after that 90% upside day had been recorded, typically you would be buying at major market bottoms.

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Well, I had a group of professional portfolio managers that we were addressing, and I wanted to tell them about this new study that we had just done. And I asked them, 'What percentage of stocks would you expect would be making new highs at the top day of the bull market?' In other words, when the Dow Jones was making its absolute high, what percentage of stocks were also making new highs?

I asked, 'How about 80%?' and there were a lot of hands. Then I said, 'How about 70%?' and there were a slightly smaller number of hands. 'How about 60%?' and smaller number yet. And I think I took it down to about 50% or so.

And I said, 'would you believe 6%?' There was this complete silence in the room. Of the 14 major market tops, between 1929 and 2000, inclusive, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average reached its absolute peak, the average percentage of stocks also making new highs on that day was 5.98%.

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To an individual investor who may be reading this, is there an indicator they can follow? The dominant theme of the chatter seems to be pretty bullish lately. If people want to know if the market is in a topping process, what would you suggest they look at? Meaning, what would you advise someone's mother-in-law? When do they throw in the towel and wait for a sunnier day, to mix metaphors?

I think the first thing an investor has to do is realize that when the news gets so good, that it just can't get much better, that that is the time to look out, to be careful. Major market bottoms are always surrounded by enormous amount of bad news, and yet that is the right time to be buying.

You have to be willing to buy in the face of bad news. By the same token, at market tops, the news is dominated by good news, and that is the time to watch out because if the news can't get any better then all it can do is get worse.

How would you describe the news environment we are in? I thought the news was pretty cheery in the fourth quarter, but we have started to see some cracks in the facade this quarter.

Well, I think generally the news is pretty positive. People are convinced that the Feds are about to stop raising rates, the unemployment numbers are down substantially and the politicians are out promoting the idea that the economy is stronger than it has been for a long time. And generally the news is good.

Outside of the geopolitics out of Korea, or Iran, or Iraq, or Israel, or Russia or China, but domestically, you think generally the tenor is pretty positive. If that is the case, what are you seeing in terms of the advance/decline line? What are you seeing in terms of new 52-week highs at this point?

Well, number one, one of the things you want to watch as a long-term indicator is the number of stocks reaching new highs. And usually that is recorded in the paper as new 52-week highs. And that indicator reached its peak back in July of 2005 and has been diminishing since that time.

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I prefer to just concentrate on the idea that about every four years on average we have a setback in the market that typically last for anywhere from nine to 11 months, and prices typically drop in excess of 20% on average. I think that is the major thing to concentrate on. Investors simply have to go back through history and realize there is a very consistent pattern of market bottoms about every four years. You can go back and see, for example, there was a major bottom in '49, '53, '57, '62, '66, '70, '74, '78, '82, '87...

'87 missed by a year, but...

What a miss. Then '90, '94, '98, 2002 and that would lead us four years later to another major bottom in 2006. And I think the consistency of that over many, many, many years simply says that there is a cycle to the stock market, much like the cycle of weather. Every year has a summer and a winter to it. And we are used to that and we adjust to it. At the same time, the stock market has a cycle to it that is about very four years and investors need to realize that that cycle exists and to accept it and adapt to it.

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