Welcome back from the weekend, one and all. We hope you had a good one, though given today's selloff I know a bunch of you likely ended up wishing you'd just stayed in bed until Tuesday. That's right. On the off-chance you didn't know, stocks got the new week started on a bearish foot, slipping a little further into the quicksand. As of Friday there was a still a chance the market could wiggle its way out of trouble. After today though, the odds of such a rebound dropped quite a bit. In fact, let's just start there today.... with a look at how the market went from bad to worse on Monday. Long story made short, the S&P 500 sunk a little deeper into the quicksand today, with a near-term recovery looking increasingly out of reach. In retrospect, with that major support line (dashed) failing to hold up on Thursday, now that the bearish ball is rolling the sellers don't seem to even be thinking about looking back. Take a look. The really curious - and not in a good way - aspect of this chart is the fact that the VIX isn't spiking. Normally when the S&P 500 plunges 1.6% in just three days and is off 2.5% from its peak, traders are freaking out, nervous it's the beginning of a major correction. Scared and a little stunned, that fear usually materializes in the form of a big, upward move from the VIX. Not this time though. Right now, the VIX is still simply drifting higher. What this tells us is that nobody is particularly surprised this is happening, which is alarming in itself. Of course, it's not like we haven't been through this before. The early-March stumble was even faster and bigger than the current one, and the VIX barely moved then too. Hmmm. Maybe the VIX doesn't matter right now. All the same, with all that room the VIX has to keep rising before a ceiling is hit, there's an equal amount of room to fear the worst for the market. Here's the updated weekly chart of the S&P 500, which shows you just how low the VIX still is. It's also in this timeframe we can see how big of a deal the recent break under that long-term floor (red) is. To answer the next question, no, neither the NASDAQ nor the Russell 2000 have broken under any key support levels yet, even though both were in the red today. Here's the Russell 2000's chart. Even with today's weakness, the bigger trend is actually still bullish here. Given all that we know about the market at this point, I continue to lean bearishly, looking for an overdue correction. The real test, of course, will be what happens on the next bullish day. It easy to be bearish when the market's falling. If the bulls take a swing but fail to kick-start a rally and end up letting this downtrend rekindle itself, that's going to confirm stocks are in too deep. That dip will need to coincide with a move under the 4926 - give or take - for the NASDAQ Composite. We'll talk more about that tomorrow, when we have some more time. In the meantime, a funny thing happened while I was watching the market unravel today.... A Place to Hide If the Market Tanks Yes, Monday was miserable for the overall market. You know what though? It wasn't miserable for every last sliver of the market. A couple of pockets and a handful of names actually made bullish progress despite the bearish tide. It's a reason to take pause. Just so there's no confusion, a stock or a cluster of stocks that's up on an otherwise bearish day does not inherently make that stock or industry buy-worthy. On the other hand, stocks and groups that manage to make forward progress on a bearish day - against the backdrop of a looming correction, no less - have a funny way of being bullish in the bigger-picture. It's just that few have noticed their relative strength until then because these stocks and groups didn't stand out until everything else was falling apart. Care to guess which group of stocks was the only cap/sector group I saw make bullish progress on Monday? Small cap telecom stocks. The S&P 600 Telecom Sector Index was up 0.85% today, which pretty much trounced all other sectors and market cap groupings. It's a hint I wouldn't ignore. In fact, if the market pulls back the way I think it's going to pull back this month, this obscure group of names is apt to become one of only a handful of market cap-based sector groupings seen as a safe-haven, shielded from a correction's clutches. That's half the battle in surviving - and even thriving in - major market corrections.. finding arenas that can disconnect themselves from the herd and do their own thing. Small cap telecom names can do that rather well, mainly because market pullbacks and even recessions just don't threaten their bottom lines the way other companies are threatened by economic headwinds or market turbulence. We saw a glimpse of this trait today. Here's a chart of the S&P 600 Telecom Index, along with its earnings trend and outlook. I know with just a quick glance it doesn't look like much, but the longer I look at the chart the more I can see how this group is finally starting to come out of a long-term funk and starting to work on a new uptrend. In fact, I think it's already turned the corner, with earnings finally stabilizing. I'm also going to guess there's plenty more volatility in store, but the hard work seems to have been done. I also took a quick peek at a few of the names that make up the S&P 600 Telecom Index, just to get a feel for how healthy this bullish effort is... a bullish effort in the face of a falling market. I liked what I saw. For instance, Atlantic Telenetwork (ATNI) has been finding near-perfect support at its 200-day moving average line for a few days and is now pushing its way up and off that line as part of a bigger-picture reversal effort. I also like the way Lumos Networks (LMOS) is bouncing its way out of a long-term pullback. And of course, Cincinnati Bell (CBB) was the name that carried most of the weight behind today's groupwide gain. As big as today's jump was, there's still plenty of room for CBB to recover last year's setback. Just putting all the pieces of the puzzle together, and knowing being in the right sector or grouping is 40% of the battle, I just think this is a set of hints we'd be wise to heed heading into what looks like marketwide turbulence. The follow-up question: Is this kind of pin-point stock-picking really worth the trouble? Can a stock really rally well when the market isn't? The answer is a resounding YES! As proof of the hand-picking premise, I can show you not one but two recent stock picks the Elite Opportunity suggested to its subscribers of late, both of which have been moving higher even though the overall market's been tanking. The first one is Kite Pharma (KITE), which John Monroe picked for EO folks back on May 18th. It's up 34% since then, while the S&P 500 is down 2.1%. The other one is Flexible Solutions International (FSI), which John recommended to Elite Opportunity subscribers back on May 29th. It's up 19% since then, while the broad market has fallen about a percentage point. The point is, you CAN make money by being a bull even in a bearish environment. You just have to know how and where to look and what to look for. The gain from the small cap telecom segment today against a bearish headwind is one such clue, though there are a few other clues out there telling you where the strength is. I'll keep my eyes peeled for more hints like the one the S&P 600 Telecom Index gave us today, but if you'd simply rather have the stock pick, the Elite Opportunity team is clearly able to find those diamonds in the rough. I'd tap into their brainpower first, especially knowing I had a 30-day money-back guarantee as a new subscriber.