Best Week Ever

Yes, it's the name of VH1's knockoff of E!'s equally vapid-yet-addicting The Soup. But while last week certainly wasn't the best week ever, it was the best week the Dow and the S&P have seen since March of 2003.

So what? Well, amid the market's recent turmoil, such strong upside is of course nearly impossible to predict. Anyone with cold feet who bailed last Friday really lost out.

Again, so what? Well, it's OK to nervously watch the CNBC ticker. But unless it's your actual day job, it's not OK to do anything about it. The technical way to talk about why it's a good idea to just methodically invest regardless of daily/weekly/monthly market movements is Dollar-Cost Averaging. The non-technical way to talk about it is that you have no idea whether this week will be another Best-Week-In-Five-Years.

For most people, putting money into the stock market (or taking it out) should be a long-view decision: "For the next 5/10/30 years, I'm going to put 10% of my income into an index fund"; "I'm retiring in 10 years, so it's probably time to shift from 85% stocks to 60% stocks".