Quotable quotes on market direction...

• Steve Shobin, chief market strategist, AmeriCap Advisers: “We’ve had a lot of characteristics of a bottom: A watershed event in Bear Stearns, a crescendo of bad news, aggressive action on the part of the Fed, excesses in bearish sentiment and today a strengthening of the weakest link (financials). I think the window of opportunity is open for a couple of months.”

• Kenneth Tower, chief market strategist, Covered Bridge Tactical: “I am optimistic that we’re near an important low and it may have been yesterday.”

• Peter Boockvar, equity strategist, Miller Tabak: "The deleveraging process is nowhere near complete, and the housing industry continues to struggle. Stocks may be putting it all together for a strong rally today, but it should not be considered the beginning of a new bull market. This rally is more the lack of further bad rather than anything good. The bulls are way too premature if they think four-and-a-half months of a bear market are enough to correct the messes we were in.”

• Tobias Levkovich, head of investment strategy, Citigroup: “One could argue that the credit bubble’s bursting and de-leveraging process could mean a bottoming out in the 1,165 area for the S&P 500 or 8.3% lower than the troughs seen thus far”

• Random Roger: "Whatever comes of all of this I think it will take a while before it is all sorted out. The media will continue to ask if now is the time to buy but keep in mind that this bear market could last until April, 2009 and still be considered normal."

• Mark Hulbert's "Double Nine-To-One" signal. "The next the 60-trading-day period produced a 22% return annualized."

• Barry Ritholtz arguing for a 20%+ rally over the next 2 months

EDIT : As Barry rightly points out in the comments section below, this was referenced in February and is probably no longer valid.

• Quantifiable edge on Tuesday: "Looking out 2 weeks there appears to be a huge bullish edge. Thirteen of fifteen winners and an expected value of 3.6% over the period. Going out 90 days the average trade would have returned over 9%."

• Traderfeed indicator review foresees bullish divergences: "All in all, we can see from the indicators that we're in a bear market mode; that we're testing the January lows; that weakness among financial stocks has been leading recent market weakness; but that there are early signs of waning new lows and waning downside momentum across the broad market."

• Art Huprich's Technical Analysis : "The ongoing dialog is along the lines of “Is the stock market still confined to an overall down trend or has signs of a potential bottoming pattern developed?” While the bottoming pattern hasn’t been completed, I believe that “characteristics of a bottoming pattern have developed.”"

• Richard Russell: "Since the stock market typically hits bottom around the middle of a recession, then working backwards Steve thinks that the stock market could hit bottom around April or May. But if this is fated to be BIG recession, say a sixteen month recession, then the stock market should hit bottom about nine months into the recession, which means a market bottom in the July to August 2008 period.”

• Yutaka Yoshino (Nikko Citigroup): “In the five times the DJIA has undergone substantial corrections during economic slowdowns, real interest rates declined so far they became negative four times. In each of these cases, interest rates turned negative and stocks bottomed at roughly the same timebecause share prices have corrected substantially in advance of the next FOMC meeting, if another cut brings real interest rates to around zero, we believe this could be a powerful trigger for a rally.”