There are bull markets and bear markets, and while each often display a pattern that matches historical precedents, there are those 'irregular periods' that break the mold. Moreover, investors need to remain cognizant of that fact that an irregular period can be long. Very long.

For example, consider the period beginning in the mid-1960s. The Dow crossed the 1,000 mark for the first time in January 1966. President Lyndon B. Johnson (D-Texas) was in the White House then, and he was in the process of escalating the war in Vietnam. Inflation rose, due to ramping defense and social spending. The Dow soon dropped below 1,000.

With institutional bulls and bears engaged in a battle over Dow 11,000 and with market's bull run showing signs of getting a little long in the tooth, investors are legitimately asking whether now is good time to exit certain stocks that have registered impressive gains, in anticipation of a correction.

The major unknown, of course, is whether a correction is up ahead. What's one act that will add ammunition to the bears' argument? The U.S. Federal Reserve's monetary policy.

TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says three times a shakeout led to yet-higher prices -- and skittish investors have missed out.

Three times this market eluded people. The first was what looks obvious in retrospect but was actually a perilous bottom, back in March. I wouldn't have recommended it here or on my show if Doug Kass hadn't pushed me and all others who read this site. It was a call of a lifetime. And we all know it, the generational call to get in. So many missed it because the moment was breathtakingly dangerous and could have been binary. I got lucky and backed into it, with Doug's help, simply by tallying all of the individual stocks in a worst-case basis, and you couldn't get much below Dow 6000, which at the time was only 300 points below, barely enough to worry about. That was the Nouriel Roubini heyday, and he managed to mark the bottom by slashing his price target for the Dow to 5000. He could have declared victory and been a hero, a la the now celebrated David Tepper. Instead, I think he's a bum who reiterates his sell at every turn. If you go back and look at all of the stocks that were at a buck and change at the moment, you can see exactly what I mean. Citigroup (C) (Cramer's Take), anyone?

It's almost October and the pundits are at again, predicting that the market should sell off again. Let's look at their reasoning.

• We have an ongoing deterioration in consumer debt.
• Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate, says that "the U.S. banking sector is now in worse shape than before the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
• Bank profitability is expected to come under pressure.
• The U.S. housing outlook is grim.

TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says the rally hasn't been a sham, but a bigger pullback would be reasonable.

I love it! Suddenly it's S&P 900 or bust! Nothing underneath us. The rally revealed as a sham. Even better, a rally in a bear market!

Now we are talking.

A 45% rally in a bear market. Maybe China had an 85% rally in a bear market! We may have had a 7,500-point rally in a bear market since I started trading 30 years ago.

I am even thinking that we have never had a bull market!

What's new? Well, trading on the NYSE is sluggish. In fact it's the slowest in two decades. Now, some of this is normal. Brokers often take vacations in July and August. Those who can do so rush out to the Hamptons or Long Island.

But this year is notably slow. Investors are busy digesting second quarter earnings and trying to figure out what to do next. The Dow did reach the 9,000 mark this week, though. We've seen a 44% rally off the March 9 lows, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, the steepest since the 1930s.

The Federal Reserve Open Market Committee (FOMC) issued its decision on interest rates. The market anxiously awaited the decision to determine if there would be any surprises like the previous decision in which the Fed announced a massive quantitative easing program.

This decision was quite different and can be summed up in two words: no change. There was virtually no change from the previous statement aside from an acknowledgment of recent economic news. In other words, it turned out to be a non-event.

TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says if they sense they're missing out on a big move, their panic could sustain a rally.

The hedge funds don't want this rally to continue, so it may just have to continue. Sometimes it is like that.

We are going to keep the rally going because of the $193 billion in new drug money and because of the lack of equity issuance and the inability of the ProShares UltraBear Financials (NYSE: SKF) (Cramer's Take) types to succeed right now, given the banks' newfound ability to defend themselves. Plus, despite the endless "purist" defenses of a broken system that destroys good banks as well as bad ones, I detect sensibility coming from Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, the FASB people and the SEC. The government is trying to take back the system, not the banks, and it shows in a better tone.

Since the S&P 500 hit an 11 year low of on November 20th, it's risen 24%. Does this have anything to do with President-elect Barack Obama? I have absolutely no idea -- but it could. That was the week when Obama cut back on talking about how there was only one President at a time and began to assemble and announce his economic team.

This was also the time I began to notice that some stocks in my newsletter started to go up. And yet the drumbeat of bad economic news continues -- with the latest being the worst decline in global manufacturing activity in 60 years. The big question for investors is whether the 24% rise in the S&P 500 is the end of a bear market rally or the beginning of a bigger one.

The only rationale I can think of for a rise in stocks is that investors may have concluded that the stimulus plan -- which has been rumored to be potentially $1 trillion -- could boost specific stocks in 2009 as that money begins to create jobs for companies that build roads, bridges, and broadband networks across the U.S. Alternatively, today's rally could reflect investors' realization that with money market and bank deposit rates near zero -- the only way to put all that cash to work is to move into stocks.

Are you participating in this Obama rally? Or do you think it's a head fake? How will you decide it's time to move your cash off the sidelines?

Peter Cohan is president of Peter S. Cohan & Associates. He also teaches management at Babson College and edits The Cohan Letter.

TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says if Citi is bailed out or bought and the autos get financing, we'd be given a chance to rally.

There was a time when I used to talk about the black holes and how if we got them fixed we could tackle the other problems from strength and not weakness.

When we last looked at the seven black holes only FordGMChrysler (collectively as one) and Citigroup (NYSE: C) (Cramer's Take) remained.

The last two days of annihilation came right back to the inability to solve for those black holes.

Now much has gone wrong for the market since then. Leveraged loans have started to spoil and commercial mortgages have soured. The life insurance annuity issues, pressured by endless declines in the market, get worse by the day.

TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says analysts will assume the worst is over. They are quite simply wrong.

If the Nasdaq rallies today, please ignore it. If you recall our now totally ridiculous run up in the Nasdaq two weeks ago, a run spurred by numerous upgrades of semiconductor and semiconductor equipment companies by analysts who are always bullish no matter what the fundamentals are, you know that it was dead wrong.

Dead wrong. I said it at the time, but in this market the bulls don't give a darn because all of their work is based on "cheapness" and that you buy stocks at this stage of a recession because you know we are almost out of it.

These are lies.

Today Intel's (NASDAQ: INTC) (Cramer's Take) really cheap. Using a Warren Buffett analogy -- although he doesn't like tech, just GE (NYSE: GE) (Cramer's Take) and Goldman (NYSE: GS) (Cramer's Take), two "much easier to figure out companies" -- Intel's now genuinely cheap. But then again, I forgot that Buffett's always right -- see Doug Kass' column -- and those who say he is wrong are simply short-term trader types.

TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says maybe the secret is to do no homework. If only that were the case.

If you want to participate in the rally that went on Tuesday I have a very specific suggestion: Don't do any homework. And don't listen to any conference calls. And don't pay any attention to the Q&As about credit and where it is going to come from and how quickly stretched balance sheets became because of all of the huge buybacks that were going on for so long.

Make sure you only follow Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) (Cramer's Take), Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) (Cramer's Take) and Verizon (NYSE: VZ) (Cramer's Take) as they had great quarters. Don't listen to Occidental (NYSE: OXY) (Cramer's Take), where the always honest CFO Steve Chazen lays it all out, lays out how so many oil and gas operators will be broken by this decline and the lack of financing available. Don't listen to Whirlpool (NYSE: WHR) (Cramer's Take) where you would learn that the worst recession in appliances in three decades is now morphing into the worst ever, and GE (NYSE: GE) (Cramer's Take) is still trying to sell its appliance division.

Don't listen to the cliff-like falloff in orders from an industrial outfit like Crane (NYSE: CR) (Cramer's Take). Certainly don't contemplate what Caterpillar's (NYSE: CAT) (Cramer's Take) order book looks like or Masco's (NYSE: MAS) (Cramer's Take) for that matter.

TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says the relief rally should last at least a day.

There's some genuine good news out there. First, the worst-acting groups and countries from yesterday -- the insurers and Hong Kong -- got some good news. The insurers are participating in the federal bailout, something that is needed to protect the value of annuities that are hopelessly underwater; and Hong Kong rallied more than it fell, which seems like total manipulation to me, but who the heck cares if you are a bull.

Second, the Boeing (NYSE: BA) (Cramer's Take) strike might end soon, and just in time for a lot of quarters, something that a United Technologies (NYSE: UTX) (Cramer's Take) and a Honeywell (NYSE: HON) (Cramer's Take) need to have happen to save their quarters. Those two fine stocks are an easy trade off this news but will presumably open up huge because of the ridiculous futures action.

As per usual, the hedge funds that most need this lift to get in shape won't take it. They can't afford to leave the market because it is their only way to get the performance back that they need so badly to keep some of the money under management.

The US markets did have a furious rally, rising 11% on major indexes. Overnight, Japan's Nikkei was up over 14%. The move to put money into banks and credit markets appears to be working.

But, don't forget the recession, which many economists see lasting longer than any downturn since 1974. Unemployment went to nearly 9% then. That is about 50% higher than the current 6.1% rate.

Yesterday, General Motors Corporation (NYSE:GM) said it would cut production more. Who would be surprised if the auto industry cut more jobs? The financial sector has lost tens of thousand of jobs, and as bank mergers go through, that is likely to go up sharply.

If there is on element which could pull the stock market back down, it is the realization that the economy is getting much, much worse and that corporate earnings will suffer accordingly.

A new wave of data about the economy will be coming soon. According to The Wall Street Journal, "The biggest data point is: the Census Bureau's retail sales report for September, on Wednesday. Economists expect sales tumbled for the third straight month, led by abysmal auto sales."

Investors who pour their money back into the market now, do so at their own peril. Don't forget the recession.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.