No Sustained Rally?

Yes, the stock market is off the bottom, but it's still acting a bit sickly, said David Ryan, founder and president of Ryan Capital Management LLC in Santa Monica, which manages money for about 90 high-net-worth individuals.

The problem?

"There is no leadership in this rally. One of the key ingredients to a real new bull market is that you see new leadership, new issues surge upwards that hadn't before," said Ryan.

He cited San Jose-based Cisco Systems Inc., the networking giant that rose sharply even during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. "Right when the market hit its low, Cisco popped and hit a new high. People never had heard of the stock," said Ryan.

But today, no key sectors or stocks are emerging, said Ryan. True, the market has recovered from recent lows, but those were depths plumbed in the wake of the terrorist attacks, which probably created an "oversold' market.

So what to do in this market? Ryan suggests cash is not such a bad place to be.

"A small return is better than a loss,' he reasoned.

Also, investors should develop "sell disciplines," so they get out when the market sours. "I have heard too many stories about the guy who started with $500,000 in the 1990s, went to $2 million, and now is back to $200,000," Ryan said.

One sensible sell strategy is to unload any stock that sinks below a 50-day moving average, said Ryan.

Steadier investors might want to use a 150-day moving average, but the idea is the same -- force yourself to sell at some point. The often ballyhooed buy-and-hold strategy may not be effective in the current choppy market, and there is no telling when this market will assert itself on a sustained basis on the bullish side, said Ryan.

Contributing columnist Benjamin Mark Cole writer about the local investment community for the Los Angeles Business Journal. His new book is "The Pied Pipers of Wall Street: How Analysts Sell You Down the River," published by Bloomberg Press.