Kevin Depew Ponders "Is the Bull Market Back?"

Kevin Depew at Minyanville.com takes a techincal look at the market to determine if the bulls will keep running, the big question is what will 2010 bring, do you buy today or sit tight?

(Minyanville.com | Kevin Depew) In September I outlined Four Scenarios for the Fourth Quarter that I hoped would unfold and help provide a bit more clarity for the longer-term technical big picture based on DeMark indicators.

There were basically four scenarios I was looking at as possibilities, all providing some important long-term context to the market. Before we get to them, let's look back and add some context to our present juncture. Below are this decade's returns for various global stock market indexes in local currencies (since January 1, 2000, and as of December 24, 2009):

DJIA: -8.96%
SPX: -23.7%
CCMP: -44.2%
FTSE100: -22%
DAX: -14.3%
NIKKEI: -44.3%
HANG SENG: +26.8%

Annualize those and you'll see that even the outlier winner -- the Hang Seng -- was a miserable performer when accounting for the risk of owning equities.

The reason to keep this in mind is because it highlights a very important point -- we've had a pretty severe global bear market in major stock indexes over the past 10 years. So the question is, what comes next?

Well, that's why I'm following the long-term quarterly charts with such interest. Just as bulls were ebullient at the top, trying to squeeze every last drop of gain out of the indexes, convinced in their herd-driven certitude we have likely reached a permanently high plateau, so too will bears at the bottom over-reach, convinced that the stock market will never again recapture old highs, dogmatic in the belief that some looming crisis will forever dampen equity indexes.

Neither will be correct. The answer is always somewhere in between, and since I have no idea what that in-between answer will be, I'll look to the long-term DeMark charts to be a guide.

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SOURCE:http://www.minyanville.com/articles/demark-four-scenarios-end-of-year-2010-TD-setup-indexes-minyanville/index/a/26089