When we’re faced with a dour financial forecast, we’re often told to batten down the hatches and stay the course. But what if the course we’re on isn’t all that great to begin with? Well for those of us who feel compelled to take action, there are ways to leverage this rocky and weak stock market.

A while ago, I wrote about why this stock market slump can be good for us and offered ways to survive a down market. Whenever we hit a rough patch of the economic cycle and the market deflates, I’ve trained myself to see the silver lining in it. Though I’m not an advocate of market timing, I believe that there are timely things we can do, depending on where we are in a market cycle.