Calling a bottom is a notoriously dif-ficult pickle. Because a true bottom is tied more closely to psychology than to fundamentals, you're really looking toward sentiment. You're looking for derivatives to stop trading in spots because there's no market for the underlying securities. You're looking for a lot of busy signals and Net outages at brokerages. You're looking for fear, for relatives and friends calling to ask how to liquidate portfolios they barely remember having.
Anecdotal evidence is useful, too.
If you know people in the process of buying or selling a house, gauge their nervousness that their loan, or their buyer's, will collapse. I also rely on two pet technical indicators. Because options expire in less than a year, it's a real nice measure of where people think the market is going. A bottom is marked when more than 40 percent of investors are bears and fewer than 30 percent are self-described bulls. Or maybe not.