A lot of the losses people are sustaining in the markets are due to the fact that people are short term investors. It is my experience that when investing in the market it is best to lump your money into a couple of different categories...high risk, moderate risk and low risk. The money that you put into high risk stocks is money that you can gamble and afford to lose. These are companies that are recent IPO and practically anything dot com. If the gamble pans out you make money and if not you don't lose any more than you expected. I believe that the moderate stocks are the companies that have been around for 10 to 20 years that have seen steady growth. These are companies like Oracle, Dell and Cisco. Occasionally there is a Worldcom that screws up, but it is the exception. They have periods of upswing and periods of downswing, but if you hang on long enough you will make some money in the long run. Then there are the low risk companies like IBM that don't grow really fast but they hang on and consistenly make a profit. If you diversify between the categories you can do ok.

As has been said, the problem is that there are too many people jumping into high and moderate risk areas to try to make fast money without some stability under them. These people are the ones that we are reading about and seeing on the news complaining that they lost their money.