As you'll know by now, the teenagers in the City use some pretty strange language - and animals feature heavily.

Bears are sellers of shares; bulls are share buyers. Dogs are shares you wouldn't touch with a barge pole - and there are still plenty of those howling their way around the streets.

The rare beast nowadays is the stag - a share you can sell for a bumper profit on its first day of trading. Those were the days!

We need to make sure the rise isn't just a dead cat bounce

This week, we're been looking for signs that the bears are preparing for a long hibernation. The bulls, meanwhile, are getting restless in their pen.

The reason for it all? Some hefty rises in share prices.

It' s like a diet in reverse - we've been putting on the pounds.

The index of shares in the UK's top 100 companies went up by three per cent on Thursday, five per cent on Tuesday, and five per cent the previous Friday.

Better still, the losses on the days in-between were slight. In all, the FTSE 100 has gained around 500 points over the last few weeks.

Turning point

Now, if history is any guide, this could be the turning point for our three-year share nightmare.

The acknowledged expert in stock market history is a man called David Schwartz, and he says there are two signals we should look out for.

The first is a daily rise of more than two per cent in the FTSE 100, in two out of three trading days in a row. We've had that twice already this week - with two five per cent rises over Friday, Monday and Tuesday, and a five per cent and a three per cent rise over Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

Dead cat bounce

But we need to make sure the rise isn't just a dead cat bounce. This is a phrase the City has borrowed from economics.

It means a falling market will sometimes recover, simply because it can't fall any further. If you really want to know why it's called that, the answer's at the bottom of this page

Sometimes the stock market rises, simply because the fall has been so sharp, it's made the market irresistible to the bargain hunters.

They then charge in and snap up some cut-price shares. That buying sends the FTSE back up again, but it's only a blip. The market falls straight back down again when they take away their shopping baskets.

To avoid that, David Schwartz has a second condition to fulfill: an overall rise in the FTSE 100 in the 15 days before the big spikes.

At the end of last week, the FTSE 100 was still lower than it was 15 days before, so that knocks out the first set of spikes.

But by the middle of the week, the market was substantially higher over the previous 15 days, so the rule kicks in. He says that's only happened 24 times since 1935, and in 23 of those cases, it was the start of a strong recovery in share prices.

So it all looks rosy.

But beware. Just because something happened in the past, it doesn't guarantee it will happen again this time - or as your financial adviser would put it, past performance is no guarantee of future growth.

Just as the City's analysts missed the start of the big share slide, it's very likely they'll miss the start of the recovery

For one thing, the markets seem to move by much bigger amounts nowadays. No one really blinks an eyelid at 200-point movements any more. The two per cent rule may not be big enough any longer.

For another, there are still plenty of city experts who think our shares have more room to fall - because American shares are still over-priced.

I know from your e-mails and text messages that this drives many of you shareholders wild with rage - but that's how it is. Share price falls on Wall Street tend to get echoed on the London trading floors.

And just yesterday, the share experts at the City bank Credit Suisse First Boston said we should stay gloomy.

Shares in the US are still too expensive, too many companies are chasing too few customers, company accounts don't the fall in trade and profit, and policy makers on the European continent and in Japan still aren't doing enough to sort out their own economic problems.

That's quite a threatening growl, even from a bear.

So don't put the champagne in the ice bucket just yet. But there is one other thought that might cheer us up. Just as the City's analysts missed the start of the big share slide, it's very likely they'll miss the start of the recovery so we shouldn't pay too much attention to them.

That's not my view. I heard it in the pub during the week - from a City analyst!

Why "dead cat bounce"? If you take a dead cat, and throw it out of a window that's high enough up, it will bounce when it hits the ground, even though it's dead.