You can say all you want that we’ve been in a secular bear market since 2000 … and you may be right.  But secular bear or not, that didn’t stop many big winners from lifting off from 2003-2007, including Apple, Google, First Solar, Crocs, Research in Motion, Coach, XM Satellite Radio, Intuitive Surgical, Potash, Mosaic, Intercontinental Exchange, Nasdaq Stock Market, Southwestern Energy, Ultra Petroleum … need I go on?

The reverse is also true.  We might have been in a secular bull market during the 1980s and 1990s, but many investors lost most of their capital during the ‘87 crash, the 1990 bear move or the ‘97 and ‘98 emerging market debacles.

Listen, I’m a long-term investor, and I plan on being involved in the stock market for decades to come.  But allowing the secular-cyclical, bull-bear debate to affect your investments can be a mistake.  It’s better to just go with the evidence the market has presented.  Right now, the market timing indicators I follow are still bullish, although the recent correction brought a couple of them close to the brink.

In the longer term, I’ve written before in a few different spaces that I do believe the bear market is over and we’re in a new bull market.  The main reasons I believe this are (a) the huge decline that has already taken place since 2007, which brought about 50-year lows in consumer and investor sentiment, (b) the bottoming process from October through March of this year, which repaired the damage from the crash (c) the minuscule number of stocks hitting new 52-week lows even during the market’s latest pullback (still in the single digits!), and (d) a couple of the “blast-off” signals the market flashed in March and April (such as 90% of all NYSE stocks getting above their respective 10-week moving averages).

Maybe a better way to say it is that, given the above, I think the odds are heavily in favor of this being a new bull market, not just a brief rally.  However, there are no 100% bets in the stock market–as we’ve seen during the past year, anything is possible in the stock market.  If my indicators turn decisively negative, am I going to say, “Well, this is just a pause before a renewed upmove.  Buy with both hands!”?  Of course not.  I’m going to go with the evidence, i.e., raise some cash, try to hold on to my strongest performers, and then re-evaluate the situation every day.  Let someone else make the bold call–remember the saying that “there are old traders, and there are bold traders, but there are no old, bold traders.”

So far, the indicators are positive, and while the past couple of weeks have been damaging to a wide array of stocks–from leaders to off-the-bottom stocks like financials and commodities–I’m still betting that this is a bull market.  Cyclical or secular?  I’ll let you debate that one.