Incidentally, while I'm thinking about the stock market; here's a little tidbit that a lot of folks don't seem to grasp. Let's say you invest $100 in company XYZ. The next day the stock drops 50%. On the following day it rises 50%. You've made your money back, right? Wrong. You're now down 25% from your initial investment. If it drops by 50%, your base changes to $50 and it takes 100% gain to get back to $100. This bit a lot of folks during the dot-com meltdown. Their stocks dropped something like 80-90% and they thought it would be easy to recover in a year if the company was projected to double earnings growth in a year. In fact it would take 2.5 to 3.25 years to recover, assuming that growth maintains that level for that period - something that historically only a handful of companies have been able to pull off.

In any event, it was pleasant to see the market bounce today. It can't go down forever. Well OK it can, but the economy isn't that bad. The majority of the population is still working and people (working or not) still need food, clothing, and shelter; and to some degree energy, transportation, and communications - the modern necessities.