Last week I advised you all to keep your investments right where they are because the stock market has bottomed out and will be back. I said you have suffered through the downs, and now it's time to enjoy the ups again. You rode the elevator down, and this particular elevator goes back up where it used to be.

Everything is up a lot since then. I gave you the exact bottom. It's not going back there. We're done. Now it's all roses and lollipops. It will be skittery, but it will take more ups than downs. Then it will friggin take off, and you'll be right back where you were before. Another couple of years and it will set new highs, and you can laugh at all the people who panicked and sold at the nadir. Friggin dummies. Screech! Eek! We're broke! The sky is falling! Yeah whatever. Friggin lemmings.

Look at it this way. Social security is not going to support you. You know that already. You have to support yourself when you're old. And the way to do that is to set money aside now and have it grow. What are you going to do with that money now? Put it under your pillow? No, you are going to put it in one of two places - your IRA or your 401k. And what do people do with IRA and 401k accounts? They buy mutual funds, that's what they do. So why on Christ's green earth will the equity market fall apart, considering that for the next 300 years zillions of people will be shoveling their hard earned money into equities?

Basically, I don't think the housing "crisis" is as big a factor as the necessity of saving for retirement. Sure, the housing crisis is a big bad thing, but I don't think it measures up to all of our needs to save for retirement, and we are damn well putting money into our IRA or 401k because that's the way we do it. I used to, until I realized I can't pay my bills, and I had to stop.

My company just had its 401k investment guy there to give us the speech, the annual speech. He said everything in the stock market is on sale now, on a 50% sale. Yup. That's about it. If I had any money, I'd buy buy buy right now. It's all on sale and it won't be for long.

He said that there are two distinct forces: intellect and emotion. He said that markets are driven by emotion, emotions such as fear and panic. He said that intellect and emotion are only on the same track as each other when they are coming at each other and about to crash. But eventually, after emotion has its day, intellect takes over and evens things out.

He ridiculed the panic. It goes along with my own thoughts. Chicken Little screaming The Sky Is Falling The Sky Is Falling. My ass.

Like I said before, the 1929 crash wasn't about stocks falling. That's not why people were jumping out of windows, because they lost half their investment. They were jumping out of windows because they were playing naughty games with the market, buying on margin, and they were fuckin broke. Unless you are a big options player, that's not what you are doing. You have bought stocks and mutual funds. You have not been just betting on whether something goes up or down. You have been buying something that still has value. If you lose a bet, you have nothing. If you buy something, you still have it. Get it? This is not the crash of 29 and this is not the Great Depression. Get it? Hey Turkey Lurkey, the sky isn't falling.

I asked the investement guy how long the market needed in order to return to where it was, after the crash of 29. He said that the low point for the market was in 1930 and it had fully regained its losses by 1934 or 1935. So. Big deal.