Like children on a long, uncomfortable car ride, investors are asking "Are we there yet?" as the stock market falls towards a bottom. Only after a rally will analysts be able to say for sure where the bottom was.
They hope it comes soon. If August is as bad as July, the US will experience the deepest market plunge since the Great Depression.
It has already been the worst bear market for the Standard & Poor's (S&P) 500 most popularly traded companies since the decline of 1973-74.
Then the index dropped 48 per cent before touching bottom. Today the S&P is already 44 per cent below its 2000 peak.
The Nasdaq is in worse shape. Tech stocks are down more than 75 per cent from the March 2000 high when the Nasdaq began its long decline.
After a brutally volatile week, when stocks traded in a daily range of 300 to 400 points, there is some ground for hoping that the bottom was reached on Monday.
At the bell on Monday, the Dow closed at 7,784 after the largest two-week decline since the market crash in October 1997.
It came roaring back on Wednesday and finished up 6.35 per cent, to close at 8,191, the biggest single-day percentage gain since October 1987. The Nasdaq surged 61 points on Wednesday to 1,290, its largest one-day advance since May 4th, and the S&P also recovered its breath.
After September 11th, the Dow fell 6.8 per cent before recovering. It has fallen 18 per cent since mid-May, showing that corporate crooks can do more fiscal damage to Wall Street than terrorists.
Mr Richard McCabe, chief market analyst for Merrill Lynch who studies Wall Street trends, believes the markets may have reached the end of their slide. He expects stocks to rebound for two to three months, then slump again in the autumn.
Morgan Stanley strategist Mr Byron Wein argues that the S&P is 35 per cent undervalued, taking into account forward earnings, risk premiums, profit growth outlooks and treasury yields and that the conditions for the end of the bear market exist.
Mr Michael Mandell, chief economist at BusinessWeek magazine, points out that, despite concerns about corporate accounting, earnings and terrorist acts, the stock market and the economy are poised to stage a stronger-than-expected recovery.
Other analysts are not so sure. "I'm not certain that we've seen the absolute bottom but we're in a bottoming process," said Mr Tom McManus, equities strategist of Banc of America Securities, who feels investors should be looking for bargains.
For really scary predictions, have a look at what Mr Bob Pretcher has to say. The former Wall Street technical analyst, whose book Conquor the Crash is a number-one best-seller of Amazon.com business books, forecasts that the Dow will fall to under 1,000 as equities and real estate markets crash and local governments default on debt. In the short term, many observers prefer not to look much further than August 14th.
That's the date when the chief executives of 1,000 publicly traded companies must start swearing their accounts are accurate.
Until then, the market can expect more nasty shocks as corporate America confesses to hidden sins and investors discover that more earnings figures have been manipulated.
But the swearing need not take place until companies file their next financial statement after August 14th - so it could be a long summer of penance.
Pessimism is rife after the long slide in markets around the world. The question worrying economists is whether the contraction of confidence will bring the real economy down too.
The disconnect between the economy and Wall Street has never been more marked. Stocks are rising and falling (mostly falling) more on how the balance sheet looks than on trends in the economy.
For what it is worth, most market analysts still forecast that by the end of the year the Dow will be somewhere in the 11,000 range or above.
