Correction: The March 6-9 crash was an anomaly. You should be looking at YTD numbers that are pretty much flat since the 9/08 fall that was expected due to the bubble.
DOW 8300 is pretty much the average/norm nowadays and will probably continue in 8000 -8700 range for at least another (2) quarters, if not another (2) years with the Marxists' spending. And yes, we could see a drop down to mid to low 70's if things continue to deteriorate (buying opportunity if you have the cash).
Emerging markets (BRIC) is where the money is being made. I'm up 22% (realized) from 1/09 to 6/09. What's the S&P done? 1.2% YTD? Maybe I was just lucky - don't think so. I did my homework on the companies I bought and didn't get greedy and sold at a decent profit.
Best advice: Check out Motley Fools...they have been are still ahead of the curve.
Correction: You ain't seen nothing yet. We still have our 1936-7 dump still to endure, that will be triggered by Obama's restructuring/deflation of the U.S. economy. We have a rally before us in late fall, I read in Minyanville and FinancialSense.com, after which the butcher's bill will come due as a bullet note, and then we'll see what a real bear looks like.
Working with the 1970's analysis of the late Edson Gould three or four years ago, Jerry Favors and (independently) the guys at Investors' Intelligence re-ran Gould's method using data from 2000 on.
Gould had successfully predicted the amplitude and timing of the 70's bear-market spike bottom and the secular bear's duration within a few months. He died before he could see whether his predictions were valid.
Favors and I.I. found that the market would experience a blowdown and spike bottom sometime about late 2005 to Q1 2006, and that buying would be greenlighted thereafter, although the bear wouldn't end until 2011.
They reckoned without Alan Greenspan's screwing around with liquidity fixes, however, and the Iraq War countertrend bull (which eventually carried to an all-time market high in 2007 -- which isn't an all-time high in deflated terms, but that's another discussion), which have generally gummed up the works and moved the blowoff low and eventual end of the bear out three or four years.
Technician Tim Wood has critiqued the Fed's distortion of cyclicity and the market's timing at FinancialSense.com over the last year or so.
Favors and the Chartcraft Investors' Intelligence staff also understandably figured without Barack Obama and his Obammunists, whose "wrecker" tinkering with the economy is likely to introduce the kind of multiple bottoming events that FDR inflicted on our grandparents and great-grandparents with his political engineering and dollar devaluation, and made the Depression into the Great Depression.
I just follow the techies now and try to get it right. Right now I'm short, but the Fed and the Boys Downtown are still screwing with the markets, so I'm down a bit since mid-April when I sought to call the turn on the March rally -- but Bernanke's been fighting me every step of the way.
The more they do this, the worse things are going to be overall.
But you're right about BRIC, I think, unless the guys who say that foreign markets still buy you diversification are as wrong as they were a couple of years ago when they thought the U.S. and foreign markets would de-link and that energy and offshore investments would provide a hedge against Greenspan's and Bernanke's dollar games. That was before Ben and Hank the Shank walked into the commodity space last summer and knifed everybody in sight.
And accidentally killed Lehman and AIG -- oops.
At this rate, the ground hog is liable to keep seeing his shadow every six weeks until these guys finally knock it off.