Another poster Jacko posts heaps of charts of individual stocks and also a sector index that includes 20 stocks or so from the relevant sector. When they start to show a bottom is in and a turn in the sector is beginning then take an interest.
You can also look at commodity price action. When a specific commodity starts looking better the interested companies will follow and vice versa.
It's hard to pick the bottom and be ahead of the curve but I'm happy to miss out on an initial gain to wait for a change in trend and be more assured of a smaller but more guaranteed gain.
Set up watchlists broken down into market segments. A rising tide lifts all boats. Often you'll see a recovery in the bigger stocks in an index ie msb and the smaller caps will follow.
When it comes to gold and oil I pay more attention to what the USD and therefore what the Aussie $ and interest rates do for some direction. Now keep in mind that I'm an amatuer and really shouldn't be commenting or giving advice.
Look at macro events.
Eg. The most recent Chinese 5 year plan. Big focus on water. Since that was announced check out what EMC and CLQ have done.
Eg. Electric vehicles mentioned in the media 18 months ago aka Tesla--lithium stocks had a huge run since then.
Signals are in the media, all around you basically, try and think outside the box and join some dots.
