With yet another market runup seemingly losing its steam, a lot of folks are wondering, “Was that it? Did we just top?” But while most investors stress out over what the market’s doing, smart traders are attuned to the secret of making safe bets using alternative entry points. Here’s everything you need to know to buy stocks safely using alternative entry points…

Buy the Dips and Sell the Rips – it’s a phrase that’s been thrown around quite a bit among traders over the past few months. It’s more than a cute rhyme though, it’s a strategy that can end up locking more gains where they belong: in your brokerage account. Today, I’m going to show you how to do just that…

It’s no secret the market this past week has been having a hard time going anywhere — but we expected that. That being said, there is a lot of order to this week’s action and the action off the most recent peaks.

If you just look at the daily closes on the indexes, one would conclude that the market is relatively healthy and is still providing opportunities to buy. But when you look at it from other perspectives, you could draw a conclusion that is much different.

On Wednesday, leading stocks started to sell off, but you wouldn’t know it from the action in the indexes. The selling continued Thursday, and it hit the indexes as well. And then on Friday, the indexes were up (led by financial and energy stocks) while leading stocks were down again. It was pretty much a carbon copy of Wednesday — while the indexes were up, the big money was selling the leaders.

The further the market goes without some sort of healthy pullback increases the odds that when we do get one, it’ll be fast and furious and feel like the apex of a rollercoaster.

To be successful in today’s market, it all comes down to understanding that you must “Invest in what you see, not what you think, hear or fear.”

For the first time in awhile, we saw the indexes take off and run for about seven days. Imagine that!  But all it did was bring the markets up to big picture resistance…

To be successful in today’s market — it’s all about YOU! The days of “well, I have a broker and he’s going to take good care of my investments” are over.

As the market is breaking into new lows, it’s time to talk about trendline breaks (in this case to the downside) and what happens/what to look for after a trendline break.