I have been on a forced media fast for the last week. The non-stop coverage coming from the speculation industry forced me to do it. I turned off the TV, avoided the radio, and stopped reading the news.

It has really become quite silly and totally unhealthy. Investments are LONG-TERM. If you have a financial planner worth anything at all, then your plan includes bear markets.

Why?

Because they happen! Of course the timing of this bear market and the circumstances surrounding it is a total surprise, but the fact that it happened is something that any good planner expected.

That is the point. We can’t know when bear markets are going to happen, but we should plan on them happening. Because we plan on them happening, we should not act surprised when they do.

If we act surprised then we end up doing things like selling our long-term investments along with everyone else glued to CNBC.

Imagine this: for the month of September and the first half of October, $105 billion dollars was pulled out of long-term investments and put, I can only assume, in cash to wait on the sidelines until Jim Cramer declares it safe.

That is $105,000,000,000!

Then, of course, we have these one day 10% moves up. Right after everyone sells…

Like Karen Dolan, Morningstar’s director of fund analysis, has observed:

“Cashing in during a fear-stricken period like the one we’re in now is like watching a bad horror flick where the plot is clear and predictable from the very start. Investors are notoriously bad market timers…we’ve found that investors buy high and sell low to their own disadvantage.”

Like a bad movie…