Hmmm. Not exactly the best day for stocks, though not the worst either. Then again, all big trends start out as small ones, and today's weakness may well be the beginning of something far more alarming. Nothing about what happened (or didn't happen) today should be a surprise to any of you though. We've heavily leaned on our in-house professional analysts for the past few days, and as you may recall, most of that analysis was on the pessimistic side. Today, those calls look like they're starting to bear fruit. No, a breakeven for the S&P 500 and a mere 0.34% stumble for the NASDAQ Composite isn't a killer. There were some subtle clues about today's action, however, that quietly started to wave some serious red flags. Take the NASDAQ's daily chart for example. On the close-up look below, what we see is a major "outside day," where the open was above yesterday's high but the close was below yesterday's low. This indicates a sudden and sweeping change of heart... the kind one might expect after traders have collectively decided a rally has run its course and the pendulum is ready to swing the other way. Sound familiar? Of course, with the NASDAQ bumping into the upper Bollinger band earlier this week, it was already ripe for a rollover. The daily chart of the S&P 500 looks the same, but different. By that we just mean there are some bearish reversal clues here as well, but it's not an outside day. Rather, the S&P 500 logged a doji today, which just means the open and close were just about equal to one another, and they materialized right in the middle of the day's trading range. This implies a sort of transitory equilibrium, en route from a bullish trend to a bearish one. A couple of other things also stick out on the daily chart of the S&P 500. One of them is the fact that, like the NASDAQ, the S&P 500 was already near its upper feasible limit by virtue of its recent encounter with its upper Bollinger band. The VIX has also been unable to break below a big-time floor at 12.9. Of course, that shouldn't be surprising to anyone at this point. The VIX has found a floor there for months. Perhaps the biggest red flag I see, though, is the way the buying volume had been drying up on the way up. If a rally is to last, it has to pull more and more participants in. This one just never did so. Now, normally this is where most people would start to panic. And the more the market peeled back, the more people would panic, with a LOT of help from a media that freaks out every time the wind blows. As has been the case so many times for the past couple of months though, The Future Investor newsletter's chief analyst James Brumley was a calming voice of reason when there were no other calm voices of reason to be found on Wednesday. Here's part of what he said to TFI members today: "We also mentioned this recently but it bears repeating now... whatever is about to happen isn't a reason to panic, nor is it a reason to make sweeping changes in your portfolio. Remember, the market ebbs and flows, and the bigger the ebb, the bigger the flow. The S&P 500 is up 8% since June 27th and is up a whopping 17% since February's low. It could use a pullback, just to burn off the froth. That's all it would be though - a pullback, to correct its high valuation. We don't see it as the beginning of a bear market. In fact, we'll be using a big dip as a buying opportunity (one we've been waiting for a while now)... ... First and foremost, on the weekly chart the [removed by editor] area comes back into play. There's a key Fibonacci retracement line at [removed by editor], which is at least close enough to [removed by editor] to give us pause -- there's more than one reason the index could halt there. The next Fibonacci retracement line lies at [removed by editor], which is a much more plausible pullback point. The forward-looking P/E would be a reasonable 15.5 there. That would be my first best guess as to a landing spot. Now, truth be told, none of this means a whole lot to the true long-termers. Thing is, few of us are actually as long-term minded as we might like to think we are. We only show you these short-term and intermediate-term charts so you can remain comfortable with your long-term positions. In the grand scheme of things, such a dip wouldn't be a huge deal... only about a (wait for it.... wait for it) 10% pullback from the high, which is the typical correction." Geez it's nice to have someone so grounded on my side. While I've learned a ton from James and The Future Investor team since May, I suppose what I've learned the most is that the one thing most damaging to a portfolio is knee-jerk responses to every shred of news, and every time the market moves a little bit. Sometimes taking a step back -- and doing nothing -- is the smart move. And here's the crazy part... the top-down market analysis is only a small part of what The Future Investor brings to the table. James and his team are also managing a long-term portfolio, and managing it quite well. Three of his eleven picks (ten are still open trades) are already up by double-digits in less than two months, with one of them up a whopping 24%. If that's the kind of perspective and long-term stock-picking your portfolio's been missing, don't waste any more time. Become a TFI member today.