This is an amazing buying oppurtunity, I don't think we have seen a better time to buy since the mid-30's (and I wasn't around for that go around).

If you have the balls for it, right now is a short-traders market, I have tripled my money in the past four months on shorts alone.

But I am taking the profits from the shorts and plowing it into long term investments, stocks that will weather the storm and come out way ahead in 10-15 years.

Just rememberthis, in every market, people are *always* making money.  Either on the high end or the low end.  The trick is, for *you* to be the one and not your broker, take what they say with a grain of salt, use them for charts and aggregate their predicitions, if they jibe with what you beleive, go for it, otherwise, ignore them.  It is your money after all; and one other thing is for sure, they don't have *any* insight that you don't have (or can't acquire with just a few minutes reading every day.

If you don't already, read the WSJ, it really can make you money.

Im so god damned screwed, Im not selling now, there is no point, I dont even check my stocks anymore, its too depressing.

Dollar cost averaging works so long as you have a long horizon, and more importantly, KNOW WHEN TO SELL.

hielo,

If you don't mind me asking are you hedging with options or are you shorting individual stocks?

My favorite is shorting individual stocks.  I pick sectors I know well, sectors where I know key players, and work the phones for the trading day.

Then you should have plenty of good shorts to go around.  Just don't get caught in that squeeze.

It seams that when we do hit the bottom, we are going stay there for a while.

I think that it is going to be slow recovery also.

[:(]

I guess that is good if you are young.  I feel bad for our older members that are trying to retire though...

On the other hand, if you can afford to buy stocks and hold them for awhile, there is money to be made.  Some people made millions on the market following the 1929 crash, so anything is possible.

My mutual funds were doing okay, but have taken a beating in the last couple of months.  I am hanging on to them, because they might be worth something in 20-30 years when I retire.  I don't have a lot of money, but I try to sock a little away each month for the long term.  Right now it is sitting in the bank, being eaten up by inflation.

I would like to buy stocks now while the market is down, but I don't know what to buy.  I am not interested in jumping on the band wagon and buying the next new thing.  You would think that you could count on big solid companies for a long term investment, but look at what happened to Johnson & Johnson.  I think I'll go to Vegas and take my chances at the roulette wheel.  At least I know the odds.

Nonsense.
I'll bet you $100 that it doesn't go below $7K.

There's a real value to the market, and there's a value imposed by those who are fleeing.
Once it drops to slightly below the value that conventional wisdom sees...

...The smart man will buy, and buy.

If you put money in, in 1988, AND LEFT IT THERE...
...you're doing just fine.

(SHTF fantasizers: ease up. Relax)

You never lose with tangibles. Stocks are like cash.......Fiat.

I'm at the point where I just can't afford any more risk.

 Most of my money is in real estate, has been for a while. I've got some in CD's, some in bonds, and some in the stock market. The stock market money is my most liquid. . and I have 3 years of law school to pay for coming up.

I'm not hurting that badly yet, but I have to make sure I've got enough money set aside to pay for law school. I can just only accept so much risk, and I'm very close to my absolute practical limit right now.

Only academics believe the market is random.  Everyone who is actually involved with them knows that's not true.  Stock prices dont move randomly.  People dont just get an urge in their heads out of nowhere to buy or sell stocks.  People buy and sell out of fear or greed.  Prices move due to human behavior and psychology, and those things never change.  

There is nothing new under the sun, least of all on Wall Street.  The same things happen over and over again.

There are three versions of random walk theory. Depending on how much friction there is in the market. This derives from efficient market theory. The idea is that markets are for the most part perfectly or near perfectly efficient. The prices of various securities reflect all currently available information. So the weak version says that you can't profit from anything that is public domain, because other people know it too and the price already reflects that information. A slightly stronger version says that you can't profit from insider information either, because there are other insiders and the prices will have reflected that information already. The strongest version says that you can't profit from anything that is even knowable. The idea is that if something is knowable, then it's already reflected in the price of the security, and the next move is independant of currently available information.