Will someone please stand up and just for once say how lousy it could all get? Now I know what that sounds like. It sounds like an eternal pessimist. Like someone who revels as the market sinks. Like a man who had the lifeboat concession the night the Titanic went down.

Well, you'd be wrong. I hate a bear market. It vaporizes my wife's options, destroys the net worth of a lot of my friends and knocks my readership -- and possibly my writing career -- for a real loop.

However, I'm also a trader. And there is no trader worth a dime who doesn't always keep an eye on the downside. Who is constantly calculating not the best that could happen, but the worst. Maybe it's the tendency of the press, or maybe it's the last remains of the bear market, but I just don't see anyone saying Nasdaq 1000! (Not that that's my prediction, by the way.)

What I do see, and way too much of, is people looking for a bottom. And they've been looking for a bottom since April 2000!

Look, I'm not here to scare you. I am here to get you to wise up and realize that markets act in strange, unpredictable ways. Maybe we go straight up from here. Maybe we go straight down. Really, I don't know. My solution, then? As always, plan for the worst, hope for the best and let the charts tell me whether to be optimistic or pessimistic.

OK, so what do the charts say now? Read on and decide if you're a buyer or a seller, while mulling Bank of America (BAC:NYSE - news - boards), Anadarko Petroleum (APC:NYSE - news - boards), i2 Technologies (ITWO:Nasdaq - news - boards), Pepsi (PEP:NYSE - news - boards), Anheuser-Busch (BUD:NYSE - news - boards), Brocade (BRCD:Nasdaq - news - boards) and the Nasdaq.