NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Remember buying the dips, the way every time to the market took a downturn investors rushed in, armfuls of cash extended, to catch it?

Those days are dead and gone: Now it's all about selling the blips. Stocks put on even the fraction of a rally and investors are there to cash out. Witness the jagged action of the past couple of weeks where the market will run up early in the day only to be pushed back into the red. Even the Dow's up-69 close Wednesday -- its first positive finish in eight sessions -- came with the caveat of it having been up as much 200 points earlier in the day.

"It is just a miserable environment out there," said Kirlin Securities chief market strategist Tony Dwyer, who thinks the recent action shows a marked shift down in investor psychology.

Perhaps it's seeing so many stocks below their worst September levels that's done it. Lots of investors thought that the post-Sept. 11 had all the hallmarks of a market bottom: Blind selling, irrational fears for the future, crashing stocks -- what Wall Street pros like to call "capitulation." Now the benchmark S&P 500 is even lower than it was then, as are 15 of the 20 most widely held stocks. The perfect moment to buy turned out to be perfectly wrong.

As the market took out its September low point it may have also taken out the remaining vestiges of a dip-buying culture that persisted long after the bull's carcass was carted out of the plaza de toros. The big wins, like buying into the Oct. 1998 drop, are all but forgotten now. So too the dream of seeing the portfolio back where it was during the golden era.

"People have gone from worrying how much they lost to worrying about how much they have left," said Dwyer. Each time the market noses up one more raft of investors sees an opportunity to preserve a little capital. And so another wave of selling hits.

Somewhere within this massive sentiment shift, where investors are giving up on stocks, things will have gone too far, points out Credit Suisse First Boston chief U.S. investment strategist Michael Mauboussin. Think back to the level of bullishness reached in Mar. 2000, when all but a handful of people thought the market could only go up. It could only go down.

"When sentiment shifts direction you may resist it," he said, "but eventually we all have a threshold where we adopt the prevailing view." Once almost everybody shares the same point of view, extremism follows (this is true outside of the market, too), and ultimately the point of view becomes vulnerable.

Are we there yet? Bollinger Capital Management head John Bollinger doesn't think so. The constant chatter about whether stocks have reached bottom on Wall Street and in the media (guilty!) shows a lot of remaining conviction that somewhere in there will a dip worth buying.

"Everybody's bet is that as soon as this stops going down it's going to rocket back up," he said. "Conviction has been eroded, but my take is it hasn't been eroded enough. The process isn't as advanced as you'd like to think."