So, we are sufficiently long in the tooth to have been through a couple large ‘corrections’ in the stock market. A few days after I had proudly bought a few shares in a mutual fund in 1987 (and was busily jabbering about it to my friends an co-workers), along came Black Friday Monday, and my shares lost (I think) about 30% of their value. I stopped talking about my investments.

Since then, we’ve been through 3 or 4 other scary roller-coaster dips: I’ve never joined the panic and sold. That may be the only smart thing I’ve ever done in the market. This time around, as I watched my life’s accumulation of ‘wealth’ head precipitously south, I briefly considered what to do: I realized that selling would lock in my losses, whereas standing pat meant they might come back, someday. We didn’t sell: now we just have to get through a recession… also not a new thing…

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