When people ask how my day-trading portfolio has had 4-figure percentage returns this year, I tell them about the ducks. You know: When the ducks are quacking, feed the ducks. Likewise, when everyone's buying, sell to them, and when they're selling, buy!

Which is what I did much of July 2002, buying particularly on steep intraday declines, understanding the odds in a market stretched to the downside.

Similarly, as of this writing in late October, with the market short-term overbought -- the Nasdaq 100 up more than 26% off its October 8 low of 795 in less than three weeks -- my tendency has been to short, particularly after opening gap-ups or intraday rallies.

I like the high-volume, high-beta stocks, many of them Nasdaq 100 technology companies like QLogic (QLGC), Brocade (BRCD), and Broadcom (BRCM), stocks that tend to swing more dramatically than the market and thus, when you're calling the intraday tops and bottoms right, give you your highest margin of profit.

Indicators I find useful include the index oscillators, stochastics and intensity-based, momentum indicators like Balance of Power and Money Stream that measure buying and selling pressure. They give me a strong sense of the degree in which individual stocks and the market in general are overbought or oversold. TCNet by Worden Brothers has excellent proprietary momentum indicators I use along with their real-time charts. As I look to play (and counter-play) the trends, I look, of course, for stocks whose chart patterns (1 & 5 minutes) make them most likely to break in the direction I'm anticipating the market going.

See how the red (bearish) bars on the underlying technicals (Balance of Power and Money Stream) signaled Brocade's sell-off on 10/28 on the 5-minute chart below. In addition, the crossover of the 50-day (longer-term) moving average in red up through the 21-day average was a bearish sign.

I also look at volume levels, as they can indicate the degree to which a market move has broad-based support. The fact that the Nasdaq had lost some volume on some of its upside moves recently indicated to me the rally was losing steam. That and the fact that the 21-day moving average appears poised to cross under the 50-day average on the daily charts, indicative of a trend change.