This stock market crash is very disturbing.

I personally have lost a great deal of money in the last year and a buttload of that has been in the last two weeks. I do not have the time or expetise to research individual compaines or the incliniation or discipline to monitor them myself after buying their stock. So my investments have moslty been in mutual funds in my 401k plan and my IRA accounts. And I have typically not tried to time any market trends, so I stay invested through the ups and downs. This has been a hard time to stay the course, but if that is your stretegy, you really have to stick with it.

Today is a perfect example of why you can't just jump out if you invest broadly in mutual funds with a stay-the-course strategy. On Friday, the Dow was in the middle 8000's. At this moment on Monday, it is over 500 points up, back over 9000 again. If you freaked out on Friday and told your broker to sell everything Monday morming, you missed a 500 point rally.

Often the way the market operates during these severe downturns is that after it hits a bottom, it RACES back in a rally that lasts only a few days. That is what all the volatility is about. You get swings of hundreds of points in a single day because investors are selling the market down, and then jumping back in with every uptick, not wanting to miss the rally. The rally sputters, and they all jump back out. But one of these times it will be for real, and the rally is going to take the market back up and keep it up. I do not think that is very far away. You canot afford to miss that. If you sell now and miss the rally, you have locked in your losses.

The compaines traded in the stock market do have intirnsic value. So many of them have been so beat up in this crash, that their stock is trading at bargain prices. If the market can reach the psychological turning point where investors have FAITH that these prices are bargains and the economy is really not going to completely collapse, money is going to flood back into the market. At least that is my hope and belief.

I am young enough that I can spend another 10, 15, 20 years waiting for my investments to regain their losses. The people we should all be worried about are the ones who don't have that long. Maybe they should not have been in the market in the first place, given that they need the money sooner. But you can be sure that their are a lot of boomers on the edge of retirement who just lost 20% or more of their retirement nest egg, dumped all their stock in a panic AFTER THE LOSSES, and will now miss the rally as it comes back. This might be you or maybe your parents or aunts and uncles. Those same people may have also been counting on their home equity for retirement --- sell the big house they have owned for years, take the profit, and downsize to something smaller and cheaper for retirement. With the losses in housing in that last couple of years, that strategy is a losing one too, just at the same time the stock market implodes.

You can be sure there are thousands, if not millions of people right now being told that after the losses in housing and the stock market, they cannot afford to retire like they thought they would just a year or two ago. I hope it is not you or your parents.

For those of you who have a lot of years ahead of you, like me. If you have faith that the economy is probably not going to completely collapse, like I do, then this is a good time to be looking for some buying opportunities. There are compaines whose stock is trading at bargain prices right now. Also, I have always been interested in investing in rental real estate, but the numbers just did not work out in my local area for long-term, cash-flow-based real estate investing. It looks like the prices have dropped almost enough to make it work. If I can get the financing (damn credit crisis!), I am going to start taking a close look at that again.