has the "trend" been broken?

to all those trend followers who often say something to the effect of why sell into this market when the trend is clearly up and we are in a bull market, you may aswell wait to the trend is clearly down before selling, the trend is your friend etc i have a question.

has the trend been broken? are you buying or selling today?

the million dollar question.

i am wondering what sort of drop contitutes the end of the bull market. do you sell on a 5% drop? 10%? 15% 20%? or is it about to turn up after 20% fall?

i mean if you saw clear downward moves in May and October last year maybe you would have sold after the mkt fell 8% and sold exactly at the wrong time!

as i wrote about last week, i myself prefer to gradually stagger my selling into seriously overbought/overvalued mkts with the view i am not good enough to pick the exact top. if it rises further i will simply hold cash for awhile, have a think about things, and happy becoz have made a killing the last few years anyway.

so thats where i am coming from with this question, if there are trend folllowers out there, how are you playing it, are your stops far away?