NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Even before markets opened Wednesday, pundits were on TV yammering about "capitulation," that perfect storm when disgusted investors sell like mad as others swoop in to fuel a rally.

News of the WorldCom scandal had broken (apparently the biggest accounting fraud ever!), and when the Dow dropped 140 points in the first 15 minutes of trading, it did indeed feel like the final washout.

And lo, late in the day, the Dow rallied back to within spitting distance of breakeven, and the Nasdaq finished slightly higher. Thursday, the bounce kept going.

So, after over two years of losses, is that it? Has the selling that would finally put a floor under stocks finally come?

"Don't back up the truck," says Hilliard Lyons, technical analyst Richard Dickson. "It ain't happened yet."

Capitulation, he says, seems more and more like Charlie Brown's football. The market keeps looking for it, and Lucy keeps pulling it away.

When investors really capitulate (as they did during down markets in 1987, 1997 and 1998), the pundits aren't there to acknowledge it. They're too busy yelling at their brokers to get them out of stocks. It's blind, it's irrational and a month later they wake up feeling awfully dumb for selling.

The anecdotal evidence doesn't yet suggest that kind of fear. "We're not getting call after call from people saying just sell me out," says Brooks Tucker, who works in Deutsche Bank Alex. Brown's private-client division.

Fact is, the capitulatory selling that people are looking for may never come. Capitulation is essentially a bull-market phenomenon, a sharp jog down in the midst of a general trend up.

Think back to the Russian debt crisis in 1998 -- people worried that financial markets were seizing up and that the global economy was on the verge of coming apart at the seams. But for all that worry, the selloff didn't last very long. Stocks hit their nadir in October; within months they were on to new highs.

The rules are different in a bear market. To begin with, says Kirlin Securities chief market strategist Tony Dwyer, after two years of selling, plenty of the people who are supposed to capitulate are already out of the market. And then there's the other side of the equation -- savvy investors who know when to come in and buy. After a dozen false dawns, it's unclear that they're out there.

"It's pretty hard to rally when nobody is interested in playing," Dwyer says.

So how will you know stocks have touched bottom? Don't concentrate on what the selling looks like. Focus on the buying. When stocks go up even as everybody and his uncle says it's just another bear-market rally, it'll be the real McCoy. Oh, and there will be time for you to get in. That's what it looked like in 1982 when the bull market began.

"The bottom itself wasn't anything exciting," says Dickson. "But when it started going higher, it blasted off."