The U.S. stock market has pared losses suffered in the six-day decline that started Aug. 17. So now what should investors do?

Most should wait before buying stocks, according to Carter Worth, a technical analyst at Cornerstone Macro, a broker-dealer founded in 2013 and based in New York and Washington D.C. Unlike most broker-owned research firms, Cornerstone’s team only conducts macro research. It doesn’t analyze individual companies.

Before the market correction that occurred from Aug. 17 through Aug. 25, the S&P 500 Index SPX, +1.05% had been trading in “the tightest range on record since 1927,” Worth said in an interview Monday. “At no point was the market up or down more than 3.7% for the year, until mid-August.”

The benchmark index has recovered some losses, but it’s still down 6.7% since Aug. 17. The damage to investor psychology has been so deep that if the market rebounds to where it was, “you will return to the scene of the crime,” Worth said. The 10.9% decline from the high on Aug. 19 through the low on Aug. 24 was the fourth-worst three-day plunge on record, he said, exceeded only by crashes in 1929,1987 and 2008.

FactSet

“Many people are in, but wish they could get out, after the loss they have sustained on paper,” he said. “They will seize that chance. Going higher from here simply returns us to where sellers are lying in wait.”

So Worth argues that “there is nothing to be lost by postponing all new buying.”

If you insist on buying ...

But some investors feel inclined to jump into stocks when the level of fear is high. There are different approaches to this during a period of volatility. One might try to isolate stocks that have taken more of a beating than they should have, but three weeks after the big drop, “you can’t do that, since too many stocks have bounced already,” Worth said.

Read:History shows that this week is best for stock market investors

Instead, he favors focusing on “stocks that have held up well, a premise that always works.”

On Monday, Worth sent a note to clients suggesting that investors who insist on acquiring stocks now should consider a list of 391 (out of 3,500) that he likes based on chart analysis.

“All things held equal, shorting the market and going long on these names should be just about as good a move as one can make,” Worth wrote.

Narrowing the list

We cannot include a list of 391 stocks here, but there are some interesting things to point out. For starters, nearly 80% of Worth’s recommended stocks are in these four sectors: health care, consumer discretionary, financials and information technology.

Here’s how the 10 S&P 500 sectors have performed this year (through Friday) on a total return basis:

S&P 500 sector Total return - 2015 Consumer Discretionary 4% Health Care 3% Consumer Staples -2% Information Technology -4% Industrials -4% Telecommunications Services -5% Financials -7% Materials -12% Utilities -13% Energy -21% S&P 500 -3% Source: FactSet

With dividends reinvested, three of the four sectors that dominate Worth’s list of stocks recommended for insistent buyers have beaten the S&P 500 Index this year. The remaining sector, financials, could see quite a nice benefit from expanding net interest margins if the Federal Reserve begins a sustained increase of the short-term federal funds rate.

When asked to narrow his focus, Worth said: “Construction, building materials, housing, home furnishings all look completely good.” That might not be a surprise, considering that U.S. construction spending during July jumped to its highest level in seven years.

Here’s are 29 companies in the home-construction or home-improvement industries, derived from Cater’s list of recommended stocks, sorted alphabetically by industry: