This too, shall pass

Wowsers - the Dow has lost 15% of its value in 1 week! That's a shaker, and no mistake.

Here's my take. We are building. We are buying. We are innovating. We are servicing. All this has not stopped, and will not stop. Oil is coming down in price. The dumb-o-cratic leadership have decided we may drill for our own oil - at least a little bit, and Obama even said we might relook at nuclear and clean-coal energy alternatives. Halleluja - the blind have seen the light.

I have stopped looking at my investments. They are as sound as any, and my losses so far are on paper. I will not cash out and make those losses real. I hope you refrain from such action as well.

My real regret right now is that I do not have some money laying around to dump into the market. These are the times that make people rich, if they have the resources and the nerve to invest. Warren Buffett must have confidence. He just bought $3 billion of GE stock. Now why do that if the world is going to hell in a handbasket? Hmmm?.

At the seasoned age of 51, I have now lived through 3 or 4 market "crashes" since I began investing. They all hurt. They are all frightening. But in each case, the recovery has been bigger and substantially more sustained than the crash. If you were to look at a stock market time line on Yahoo here:

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=%5EDJI#chart1:symbol=^dji;range=my;indicator=volume;charttype=line;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=on;source=undefined

you will see that the current downturn is still not as drastic as it seems when looking up close. Check out the dip from January 1973 to July of 2004 (1.5 years) when the Dow went from 1,020 (that's right, one thousand and twenty) to 607.

That's a "loss" of 40% FORTY PERCENT, sustained over a year and a half. Funny - I don't even remember it being dinner table conversation in my house.

Now the Dow has been as high as 14,000, and is currently in the high nine thousand range.

Personally - I believe it will recover and do so quite nicely. It may take a little bit - maybe more than a week! Holy smokes. Can we ever survive?

Sure we can. Take a breath. Go for a walk. Watch a movie. Have some ice cream. Read a good book. Live your life. Stop watching the news. Just stop. We'll be OK.

Even if Obama gets into office.