it's better to short weakness than to short strength, but if you must try to pick the top then you have to play small and use close stops. Sometimes it takes MANY attempts to get the turn, that is where discipline takes over.  Might be better for you to wait for a clear reversal, and m.a. crossovers. The second mouse gets the cheese.

I think you've said it very well. I've never been a conspiracy guy at all, but this market has so many earmarks of manipulation. Clearly our government wants the market up, but the Fed cannot legally intervene in the equity market like it intervenes in the bond market, so I've been thinking about how this is probably working. My own hunch is that a few soverign wealth funds (China probably, Japan maybe) have funneled very large sums to GS (which seems like it has become our de facto Treasury Department) and that gives them the ability to do things like hit the market with a 15 billion dollar futures buy at a key reversal point -- some place where you trap a lot of shorts. I think for the Chinese or Japanese or whoever, it's a win-win deal -- they are probably making a huge ROI on their GS trading account, and they are effectively working with the Fed and the Treasury to prop up our market, which is just as important to them -- a US crash pulls them down too. And they're used to propping up markets -- the Japanese have been trying to do it forever -- and we can all see how effective it's been! How long can they keep it up? Probably until it becomes painfully obvious that we are not recovering and that the banks are still choking on bad paper, etc. There is something about October that fixes the mind.