Are you a seller or a buyer these days?

With a market drop like yesterdays and the sickening erosion in prices we've been experiencing of late it's hard to imagine many are happy with stocks. Top it off with the hard reality that the dollars you have to invest are worth less now - by about 50% - than they were last year and it sort of makes you want to find a hole to crawl into.

The news is all bad and shows no signs of improvement. This pesky credit crunch brought on by the housing debacle continues to roil the financial industry. Prices are headed up. It costs double just to get to the grocery store and back. Floods in the midwest are sure to put even more upward pressure on food prices. To make matters worse, the dollar's value is miniscule so your savings valued in dollar terms are worth less in real terms.

Invest? Me? Now? You have to be kidding!

No. Actually I'm not. We're probably now into one of the single best opportunities to invest in our entire lifetime. And it's precisely for the reasons given above. Turn it around and ask yourself can it get any worse? I suppose the answer is "Yes, it can," but the reality is and history shows it's always darkest before the light.

Think about it this way. Your devalued dollars sitting in your bank account do nothing for you but make your poorer as they devalue further in the face of rising prices and the falling dollar. As long as you hold dollars you're losing wealth. The best thing you can do with your dollars right now is trade them for any asset with intrinsic value higher than its current asking price.

Is it time to invest? My answer is: Yes, absolutely.