I can't think of a more useful general dictum than "buy low, sell high". So you want to buy high, and hopefully sell much higher? I haven't figured out a way to do that. Has anybody else here figured out a way to do that? Anyone serious about buying and selling the major stock indexes is going to find that taking long positions entails the incursion of at least short-term pain--I suffer enormously when I purchase futures on the big indexes. I felt like an idiot stating a couple of weeks ago that it was time to go long. While I'm long now, I would NEVER recommend initiating a long position in the current market predicament. The time to buy the major indexes is when there is blood in the streets which is starting to clear, but not now.