Desperate to find a reason to buy stocks? You aren’t alone. Everyone wants to be the one to pick the bottom of the market and to make the fortunes that tend to come with doing so.

This week’s Businessweek devotes pages to looking at the best stocks to buy at the moment. This month’s Smart Money (a magazine produced by the Wall Street Journal) has as its main headline the pronouncement that “now’s the time to jump into cheap stocks”. Nearly all the UK’s main newspapers have also run columns this week telling us that with all the “blood on the streets” we should be beginning to buy.