Knock, knock, knock.

Could the selloff in North American stock markets during recent weeks be the sound of opportunity wiping its feet on investors’ doormats?
And if so, in what sectors?

Adrian Mastracci, investment counsel at Vancouver’s ‘fee-only’ KCM Wealth Management, says, "It seems investors may be worried. Appetite for risk is diminishing. Some are heading for more safety. Adjusting to a low investment return world is a continuing reality.”

While markets chugged ahead during most of the winter, money managers universally lamented the lack of bargains out there, as the stock pickings were thin. Now, the old adage of “buy when it snows and sell when it goes” has kicked in.

Energy companies and technology firms led the selloff as the Standard & Poor’s/TSX Composite Index, which had long resisted the continental swoon, finally joined the toboggan ride with its biggest weekly drop in eight months, some 3.1 per cent.

For weeks, high oil prices had moved markets in opposite directions — pushing the energy-laden S&P/TSX index to a four-year high on March 4, while dragging the consumer-driven Dow Jones Industrial Average down.

But now even the Canadian market has been suffering under the weight of lofty oil prices.

“There are a lot of people who have made a lot of money, particularly with energy stocks, and the bears are coming out of hibernation and scaring their pants off,” Peter Brieger, of Toronto-based GlobeInvest Capital Management Inc., told Bloomberg News.

On the year, the S&P/TSX is treading water with a 0.7-per-cent gain, while the S&P 500 is down 5.0 per cent, the Dow Jones is lower by 5.7 per cent and the tech-heavy Nasdaq has shrunk 11.7 per cent.

In Canada, besides the effects of energy prices, investors have become skittish due to the uncertainty of a minority federal government.

The financial sector, which in recent years has been a haven for investors to plunk their cash, knows the prospect of bank mergers will not brighten until political stability returns.

And this week, Finance Minister Ralph Goodale warned opposition parties that their failure to pass his February budget will mean much-welcomed changes, such as the elimination of the 30-percent foreign content limit in Registered Retirement Savings Plans will die.

The debate among technical financial analysts is whether we could have one last leg of a bull market — lasting until June or September — or whether the correction has started in earnest.

“It seems investors may be worried,” said Adrian Mastracci, of Vancouver-based KCM Wealth Management. “Appetite for risk is diminishing. Some are heading for more safety. Adjusting to a low investment return world is a continuing reality.”

That certainly plays nicely into the pattern of the markets basically taking the summer off, as productivity cools during those lazy, hazy; crazy days.

Then we get the traditional mini-collapse in September or early October, before the markets roar back to life for another six months.

But if this correction continues and is, in fact, the beginning of a full-fledged bear market, what kind of buying opportunities are starting to present themselves?

There are those who feel that energy and the other commodities that have done so well due to China’s consumption — uranium, coal and steel, among others — still have a year or so of upside.

But the next six months could be the right time to resurrect a long-buried sector that we all vowed never to touch again after what happened during the first two years of this century. Dare we go back into technology stocks?

As this week was ending, companies like Nortel, Research ln Motion, Celestica, IBM and server-maker Sun all suffered greatly.

“People are putting tech to bed for the next two or three months,” CIBC World Markets analyst Steve Kamman told ROBTV on Friday. “I do believe we are starting to go into a recovery mode.”

Is the time when companies have to replace all those computers they bought in 1999 to ward off the demon Y2K now at hand?

Do you feel lucky?

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