Interesting question that is more a inquiry about your personal investment style than an actual marketplace. The hardest part about the three year downturn that has admittedly fried a few portfolios but may also be over, was finding the opportunities.

There was a study done recently by Charles Schwab that found that black investors have not returned to the markets in the same way white Americans have remained in the market. The outcome of this reversal of faith in equities is due largely in part to a misunderstanding of how the markets operate rather than a racial mindset. During the late nineties, many investors came to the markets in the hopes of attaining all of the riches being touted by the headlines. Understanding the markets wasn't a necessity in those days. Involvement was all that was really required.

Without reviewing too many of the details again, those new investors, many of who were African American, felt the sting of the decline harder than investors who had been in the market longer. Those long term investors knew that time would heal those wounds even as they lost heaping mounds of newly made wealth.

Markets are not about timing as much as they are about time itself. The opportunity presented by the bear market will fully manifest itself in the new bull market if you have been dollar cost averaging your way through it. Shares bought at bargain basement prices in index funds who had fallen from those historic highs and doing so consistently may have been costly from a loss (taxes, capital gains, and loss of principle) but when this market gets on the footing it needs sometime early in 2004, all of those contributions will be what long term investors smile about.

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