For the moment, forget cranky Alan Greenspan and uninteresting interest rates.

And listen to the bulls. They will always tell you when to run for cover - by NOT telling you to run for cover.

And when the bulls start sounding desperate, as they have lately, that may well be a red flag that things can get even nastier than the 41/2-per-cent correction in the Standard & Poor's 500 index in the first four months of the year.

How do you know when desperation has taken hold of the bulls?

First off, they have bags under their eyes the size of grapefruits. Could it be that the bear is keeping them awake at night?

But the real kicker is when the bulls start using stupid stock market clichés in every second sentence. That's when you know the market may be vulnerable to more pain and less gain.

The cliché we've been hearing more often lately is that old standby: Markets Climb A Wall of Worry. Which they do. But don't markets also FALL OFF a wall of worry?

Another common symptom of a desperate bull is the penchant to ridicule the bears' clichés such as this one - Sell In May And Go Away. This cliche is not only dumb but untimely.

This year, it was a month late and a dollar short. So next year, the refrain will be, Sell In April And Go Away. So sell in March.

When the market starts to break down through key support levels for some of the indices as we've seen lately, the bulls will also resort to wishful thinking. They will bombard you with historical statistical information - such as suggesting that 2005 should be a positive year based on the previous record for years ending in 5.

In a vulnerable market, the bulls tend to paint themselves as portraits of contrarianism. The problem is that often they wind up looking like premature contrarians, catching the falling knife as many did when the market collapsed in 2001.

With the S&P 500 at 1,156 through April, the market was clearly in a downtrend and stocks have been dropping even on good news, which is always a bearish sign.

So is the fact that the indices can't seem to get a head of steam without a boost from falling oil prices.

There are some curious characters wearing the bulls' horns these days, including one who is known primarily for giving away cash on television in a game show called Win Ben Stein's Money. Yes, Ben Stein, who also freely admits to being an economist, has been among those bulls thumping the tub this spring.

In his weekly column in the New York Times business section, Stein recently wrote: "It's time to buy ... Mr. Market, as the legendary investor Benjamin Graham called it, is cutting prices and giving you a chance in on the bargain."

In what many believe is a stock picker's market, Stein pitched the broad market as a "juicy" long-term buy based on a flurry of historical stats, but made no mention of the hazards of catching falling knives by jumping into a downtrending market.

Meanwhile, the recent weakness in the market has had the usual Wall Street suspects typically becoming more and more bullish. One of those is Tobias Levkovich, chief market strategist with Salomon Smith Barney, who continues to stick to his guns on his 2005 target of 1,300 for the S&P 500.

"This is just the kind of market that should be bought, not sold," Levkovich wrote in a recent note, as the market continued its descent.

As a prognosticator, Levkovich isn't exactly setting the world on fire. As part of a USA Today panel of pundits in December, he picked five relatively conservative stocks - Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MWD), Applied Materials (Nasdaq:AMAT), Marriott Hotels (NYSE:MAR), Viacom (NYSE:VIA) and Wyeth (NYSE:WYE) - as his top picks for 2005. Four of those stocks are down year-to-date, including Applied Materials, which is down 12 per cent (Wyeth is up eight per cent).

Last seen, Levkovich was reiterating his bullish stance in an interview on CNBC.

He appeared weary and flustered in making his case, and the prospects for the old cash-in-the-mattress investment portfolio looked even brighter.

Which brings us to the most useful mantra of all: Cash is king.

* STREET TALK: Dennis Gartman, one of the few pundits whose word carries a ton of clout in investment circles, has turned very bearish on the market.

In a recent interview on the Money Talks radio program on the Corus network, Gartman, whose Gartman investment newsletter is distributed to many of the major institutions, told host Michael Campbell of his stormy market forecast: "The hatches need to be battened down and they need to be battened down with two nails."

Gartman also said he was shorting the TSX index because of the political "dustup" in Ottawa.

* SAGE WORDS: "Instinct - the subconscious - is much more reliable than statistics. One should follow one's own convictions."

- Philip Carret, one-time fund manager and author of The Art of Speculation.

Hot Stock

Aurora Platinum

TSXV:ARP $1.82 Up 79 cents (+76.7%) on 3.18 million shares (based on weekly stats through May 5 for Canadian stocks over $1) Here's one surefire way to stop the bleeding on a mining sector that has fallen out of favour and out of bed. Shares in Aurora had been cut in half during an ugly six months for precious and metals stocks, but shareholders got a helping hand from FNX Mining (TSX:FNX), which offered $1.83 per share to acquire the Vancouver exploration company.

Cold Stock

Advanced Fiber Tech (AFT) Income Fund

TSX:AFT.UN $4.00 Down $1.75 (-30.4%) on 1.25 million shares (based on weekly stats through May 5 for Canadian stocks over $1) Bottom-fishing those reeling income trusts is proving to be a fool's game. Even after the unit price of AFT had been chopping in half in the past year, shareholders of the Quebec-based company mercilessly put the boots to the stock one more time as concerns mounted over how distribution payments may be impacted by the company's latest financials and its gloomy forecast in a challenging pulp and paper industry.

(Gyle Konotopetz can be reached at gyle@businessedge.ca)