You're absolutely right in the short term but I'm counting on the prices on Wall Street to not be an accurately reflection of the value of business in our country for the next few years.

Doing any purchasing of stocks in individual companies right now (unless they're depression-proof industries) is scary indeed but mutual funds have risk spread over many companies and you'll never really see a complete drop of value in them unless the absolute worst case hits and we're all screwed then.

When I say there are bargains now, I'm talking about buying into things that require no short term liquidation. You shouldn't be playing if you must cash out any time in the next few years. Now I can almost guarantee you that within 10 years we'll once again see huge spikes in stock values even periods of massive overvalue (it's human nature). If you can get in now and wait, the gains will be substantial. Real estate is also there for the pickings now.

So far I've found I'm very good at reading these things. The money I'm playing with is overinflated earnings I got from other bubbles and banked so really this is like hitting a jackpot in Vegas on the first machine you stick your quarter in and playing with the earnings. I'm not using money that we need for daily needs.

Art