Q&A: Paul Desmond of Lowry's, Part II

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.

Top of the Charts

Let's focus on the tops. We talked a little bit about breadth and we talked about how a top is a process, unlike the bottom being more or less a point. If investors are a little concerned, what should they specifically be looking for in order to see signs of a market top?

Well, if we were in the fall foliage season prior to winter, what we would tend to see in the trees up north, we'd start to see leaves dropping off the tree one at a time. And the stock market is very, very similar, that as you get into the latter stages of a bull market, individual stocks tend to peak out and begin to drop into their own individual bear markets, while there are still a lot of stocks continuing to advance.

As the bull market becomes more and more mature, a greater number of individual stocks tend to fall off the trees, so to speak, and drift to the ground, whereas the investment community is not watching the leaves, they are watching the indexes. They say, 'gee, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has made a new high today.'