The market is not a safe place to park money you might need in the foreseeable future. If you own stocks you ve bought without knowing anything about them stocks you bought because this was all so much fun, and so easy sell them. Yes, they might go back up, but they might at least as easily go back down, and the only thing keeping a lot of them up even this high is the reluctance of people like you to sell at these new, much-lower prices. Given the lower costs of trading and the virtually instant global dissemination of financial news . . . New Economy stocks are particularly hard to value, and that difficulty shouldn t and doesn t make them worthless.
Any fool can see that that s nuts.
But I would argue that the valuations in many other stocks in the environment we had up until last week, and still have to a certain extent, were every bit as unreal. Value is like truth and truth is like justice. They are not always easy to discern, and we sort of zig and zag around them as we strive for them. But we do strive for them. And thus value becomes the baseline against which to make sensible investment decisions.