Bear Market Rallies Starting To Look a Little Different

While Wall Street's recent surge may vanish just as quickly as it arrived, the rebound came with something the market hasn't seen in awhile—buying into a rally.

Since stocks entered bear-market territory during the summer, investors have been notoriously skittish during rallies —often staging late-day selloffs on hopes of quick profits and fears that there are too many headwinds to sustain a move higher.

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But that wasn't the case with the nearly 900-point Dow rally of the past two trading days, particular during Monday's move upward which saw buyers take a mid-day break but then return with full fury as indexes closed about up 5 percent.

"The sentiment's starting to switch a little bit," says Nadav Baum, managing director of investments at BPU Investment Management in Pittsburgh. "People are talking that this is a bear market rally, but it could go on a little bit."

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In addition to snapping up some of the bigger market movers, investment advisors are pushing their clients into broad-based exchange-traded funds that take advantage of moves higher in the major indexes without as much risk as buying individual stocks.

Also, municipal bonds are getting a lot of attention as market pros look for ways to protect principal while also trying to squeeze out at least modest yields.

"Most of the tax selling is done and the hedge fund redemptions are over," Baum says. "Hopefully we can turn the old Santa Claus rally into year's end. There are some great companies out there that are trading at major discounts."

Obama and the Treasury

Analysts were cheered that even though markets moved lower Tuesday, there was no massive sell-off following the big rally.

The most influential market movers since Friday have been President-elect Barack Obama's appointments of his economic team and a new round of government intervention aimed at stopping the bleeding on Wall Street.

Amidst the developments, investors have been finding value in a variety of ETFs and a handful of strong companies.

Baum has been using the Vanguard Value (NASDAQ: VTV) ETF, which tracks the MSCI US Prime Market Value index. Some of the companies in the fund include ExxonMobil (NYSE: XOM), General Electric (NYSE: GE), Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) and Chevron (NYSE: CVX). The fund also pays a 5 percent dividend.

In addition, Baum likes some the Select Sector SPDR, or "Spider," ETFs that are popular among investors and play the broad indexes. He advocates the S&P Deposit Receipts (AMEX: SPY) which tracks the movement of the S&P 500.

"You can buy these great baskets of equities and get returns of individual equities," Baum says. "That's a very smart thing to do for individual investors--spread out the risk and still get nice returns."

Emerging Markets Back?

Market rebounds also provide opportunity to ride stocks that were beaten down and are due for a snapback.

Infrastructure plays were the rage earlier in the year as emerging markets continued to explode, but then backed off in the third quarter as global economic gloom set in. But now may be the time to get back on board, especially in light of the Obama administration's likely reliance on public works projects as stimulus to kick-start the economy and the expected resurgence of some of those foreign economies.

"We've stretched the rubber band significantly in one direction," says David Twibell, president of wealth management for Denver-based Colorado Capital Bank. "Nothing goes up or down in a straight line. We've seen this movie before."

CNBC experts discuss how to make money in this market, in video at left.

Twibell has been directing clients gingerly back into infrastructure plays including McDermott International (NYSE: MDR) and Shaw Group (NYSE: SGR).

"The whole theme of development in emerging markets, I don't think we're anywhere near done with that. That's something that's going to go on for decades," Twibell says. "We hit a big pothole here, but I think the outlook for these companies is incredibly strong."

He also is looking at some ETF plays that capitalize on holiday rallies, which he says could be led by small- and mid-cap companies.

Differing Strategies

Needing to capitalize on a Santa Claus-rally is a microcosm of current investing strategy, with differing schools of thought on whether the buy-and-hold three- to five-year investing strategy allows investors to be nimble enough to profit on short-term moves.

Those playing municipal and corporate debt are doing so mostly on a short-term basis, not wanting to get pulled into the longer end of the yield curve. Yields move higher when investors dump bonds and take on more risk in the stock market.

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"For longer-term clients we've been buying (stocks) all along," says Randy Carver, president of Carver Financial Services in Mentor, Ohio. "Our philosophy is more of a diversified long-term allocation versus a market-timing trading one. So I think there's some great value out there but you need to be three- to five-year equity investors."

Yet Carver also says investors need to find places to shield themselves from risks, so he's buying municipal debt as well as certificates of deposits to protect cash.

On the equity side, he's in a variety of ETFs, playing some of the SPDR funds as well as the iShares S&P 500 Index (NASDAQ: IVV) fund and the iShares Russell Mid-cap (NASDAQ: IWR) ETF.

BPU's Baum says investors do need to be nimble, but should use caution. He advocates sort of a reverse dollar-cost averaging into stocks, where investors should capitalize on momentum and buy stocks on the way up rather than trying to catch bargains on the way down of companies that are trending lower.

"I would use the nimble thing going in slowly. If you want to invest $10,000, you go in $2,500, take a look at it, and if it goes higher maybe put another $2,500 in," he says. "One thing retail investors don't do a good job of is buy in the way up. Retail investors tend to dollar-cost average on the downside. I would rather buy today on the way up."For more stories from CNBC, go to cnbc.com.

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