An eye on market trends can position you for success

There are times when market behavior can drive serious investors nuts. Two hundred points up one day down just as dramatically the next, stocks gyrating disproportionately to news of the moment.

What's going on? Here's the way we see it:

Interesting things are happening. We may be on the cusp of significant changes in the markets, changes that could bode very well for serious investors. Several times this past year I have written about market indexes and averages that have been driven higher by a handful of stocks, creating the appearance of a strong market while the reality has been that most issues have not participated in the market's upward move. The accompanying graph illustrates that fact.

The solid line of the graph represents the New York Stock Exchange Composite Index