Is this blood in the streets, yet?

Wow, it's been really gloomy and doomy the past couple of weeks.

We can't hear enough about how the financials are going to continue to tank and the economy will continue to have a tough time even just puttering along.

Then all of the sudden, I wake from my financial news inundation stupor to realize that the Dow just tacked on 400 or so points in the last week and banks and financials had two pretty good days of upside as crude oil retreated.

I'm looking toward next week for a follow-through, but I am starting to think it might be time to nibble a bit on stocks.

They say the time to buy is when there's blood in the streets. And it sure looks that way right now. Then again, I thought that a couple of months ago, too, and it proved not to be the case.

But something Paul Elliot of The Motley Fool wrote Thursday struck me as poignant:

"If, like me, you like the idea of loading up on proven cash generators like American Express (AXP) and Starbucks (SBUX), or any of the two dozen other market leaders trading at bargain-basement prices, you want to do it when some clown on CNBC is shouting, 'There's a 10 percent chance we'll have a Depression! ... Kooks aside, this is the ugliest mood I've seen on Wall Street in 20 years of following the markets ... Does this mean we've hit bottom, and it's smooth sailing from here? No. But it does tell me that now is the time to buy stocks."

Brian