1 month, and things have gotten worse...

Bailed Out, Thanks for your reply on my previous post.

Now one month has passed and things have gotten extremely bad in the market. Things have deteriorated so bad in the last week. I'm thinking that the 80k I talked about last month (of the 100k you had on 1/1/08) is now worth about 65k. That's about a 35% loss YTD- looking at fund performance within Fidelity 401k, this about right.

Does it get worse? A better question would be "Does it get any better?". I don't think so, not in the short term. The Dow is under 8600 and there's no telling where the floor is. A few us timers knew the bubble would be bursting, and my guess was that the dow was gonna floor at 8500. What I didn't realize was how fast this would happen and that things can get a lot worse than 8500.

Hard to know what to do with cash on the sidelines. I'm going to be looking at P/E ratios and see if we can't eek out any information on some value investing for the long term. Aside from market timing, isn't investing about dividends and interest? I believe there are still good companies out there - even sectors - that are going to make money in this market. Hard part is finding which... Energy stocks are in the toilet, just check out XLE . Gold seems to be the hot tip, but I'm too late to catch that train.

Everyone's expecting some kind of magical pill that will turn the entire market around. Isn't going to happen (credits tight, unemployment high, earnings (for 3Q, we'll see). From, experience we're only in year 1 of at least a 3 year downturn (this one's expected to last at least 5). We've got a long ride on the back of this bear.