When it goes a week or two without shooting about four hundred points in one direction or another, we can talk about "weathering the storm."

I made one trade this week, switching a money fund for one with maybe a quarter-point more interest. The rest I sat on. If the market stays low for a while, I might pick up some more vanilla index mutual funds (S&P 500 stuff). Most of the money in my accounts (SEP IRA) has been put there over a number of years. The market would have to drop about another two thousand points before any significant amount of my portfolio would be worth less than what I paid for it. Unless they just started out with their retirement account in the past few years, most people are still ahead of the game. Assuming they've been smart enough to buy and hold.

I don't know who is out there frantically buying and selling everytime a cloud passes over the sun, but it seems to me to be a hell of a way to run a portfolio.