What is the best bear market strategy?

The first key to successful swing trading is picking the right stocks. The best candidates are large-cap stocks that are among the most actively traded stocks on the major exchanges: for example, Intel, Microsoft, and Cisco Systems. In an active market, these stocks will swing between broadly-defined high and low extremes, and the swing trader will ride the wave in one direction for a couple of days or weeks only to switch to the opposite side of the trade when the stock reverses direction. It should be noted that in either of the two market extremes, the bear-market environment or bull market, swing trading proves to be a rather different challenge than in a market that is between these two extremes. In these extremes, even the most active stocks will not exhibit the same up-and-down oscillations that they would when indices are relatively stable for a few weeks or months. In a bear market or a bull market, momentum will generally carry stocks for a long period of time in one direction only, thereby ensuring that the best strategy will be to trade on the basis of the longer-term directional trend.