You are right, Most of the time market is in the side-way range. The S&P 500 was almost entire year in side-way range, then jump up and almost entire 2005 in side-way "lazy" action. Some may say that now we are in side-way since June 2014 - As S&P 500 dropped to the lows set in October of 2014 but did not broke them and so far we do not see the broken highs set in April-July 2014. I guess, in many cases we may talk about the same stuff, and each of us could be right, its just we look at it at different angles and we are looking at slightly different time-frames.