Will Rogers, the Depression-era wit, once gave this formula for making money in the stock market: "You just buy some stocks, and when they go up you sell and make money."

Byron R. Wien, U.S. investment strategist for Morgan Stanley & Co.; Mark K. Tavel, president of Rothschild Asset Management; William J. Ruane, chairman of Ruane, Cunniff & Co.; Robert J. Farrell, chief market analyst for Merrill Lynch; and Leon G. Cooperman, chief executive of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, talked last week of the different tools they use to try to lessen their own confusion.

Farrell is a "technician," a technical analyst who tries to divine future stock movements based on such factors as trading volume, advance/decline lines and prices rather than economic analysis. Both the Dow Jones industrial average and the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index have hit record highs recently. But Farrell said, "The averages are stating a picture different from the average stock."