When will it be time to "buy the dip" in this market? It's possible that you'll want to wait awhile.
This is from Goldman's Weekly Kickstart:
Global equity markets came under pressure this week following disappointing China growth data and mixed 4Q earnings results and ahead of the State of the Union address and the FOMC meeting next week. The S&P 500 fell 2.6% while EuroStoxx 600 (3.3%) and MSCI Emerging Markets (3.9%) dropped further.
The downward bias for S&P 500 may continue based on our Sentiment Indicator, which shows institutional clients hold high net long futures positions and implies negative returns over the 4-8 week period starting late December when it initially breached 90. It now stands at 82.
In other words, the market has been caught extremely one sided. We wrote about this on the interest rate side of things, that basically every fund manager has been betting on bond prices to go down, and that they reversed violently last week in a short-squeeze. The equity market has been can't lose for so long, so you have ultra-bullish positions combined with some fresh turmoil (largely out of emerging markets) and it's possible that the selling will continue for awhile.