Talk about living in turbulent times! Have you noticed how the US stock market has been taking a beating of late?

If you wanted an example of a real yo-yo market, you only need have followed the Dow Jones over the last few weeks and this would have been a perfect example. Not that the Nasdaq was performing any better either!

With all this movement, it’s almost as if the market is desperately trying to establish a trend, but not quite settling into one.

Whenever this happens, our advice to any would be investor is to resist any temptations to jump in to make a quick kill, as the technical signals appear to be somewhat inconsistent and are not reliably leaning in one direction or another.

This is a typical sign that the market is in a yo-yo trading mode, with gains that are made in one week being given back the following. This is an expensive way to learn about market volatility.

It appears that a lot of the smart money is not convinced that the bottom is in place and therefore does not see an opportunity to buy good stocks cheap just yet.

Meanwhile there is lots of noise coming from market gurus and other would be “experts” on what stocks to buy and why, with many of them having conflicting views on what the market is doing at the moment.

Our advice? The market’s too unstable at the moment and some perfectly decent stocks are getting caught up in the general turbulence. Let things settle a little better before you even begin to think about diving in.