Bear Market Will Require Trading-Style Changes

Updates for all of the trading vehicles tracked below are bearish, implying that Monday’s hard selloff did not exhaust the downtrend. Even so, our two key bellwethers, AMZN and AAPL, are both close to interim supports that look likely to evince tradeable rebounds. I am becoming less enthused by the day about bottom-fishing such supports, however, because two such attempts in AAPL over the last week seriously underestimated the intensity of the selling.  Old habits die hard, and we’ve become used to buying weakness in the FAANG/lunatic stocks even as we’ve disdained the buy-the-dips mentality that has prevailed on Wall Street for almost a decade. Because of the growing likelihood that stocks have entered a bear market, any bottom-fishing we do henceforth will necessarily be more cautious than before. We’ll get more leverage, for sure, since short-covering rallies are going to be more vicious than ever; however, the risks of being wrong have increased commensurately.