Well that felt (just about anything but) good, didn't it? A 311 point haircut. No question, a lot of people, myself included, are seeing a lot more red this morning than they're used to lately.

The bears are lapping it up. If you happened to be in one of the two major Exchange Traded Funds set up to cater specifically for the market bears yesterday, you did just fine. Both the Prudent Bear, BEARX, and the Grizzly Short, GRZZX, were up over 2% yesterday.

If you've been bearish recently, yesterday was a big payoff day for you. In fact, you've been feeling pretty good about your investment choices for a little while now. Looking at the chart below tells me your returns have been ahead of the S&P 500 returns for a few days now. In fact, if I had invested all my money in the Grizzly Short fund a month ago, I'd be ahead of where I am today by well about 10%.

In fact, however, if I had invested 100% of my retirement portfolio a month ago into the iShares Lehman TIPS Bond Fund, TIP, I'd be ahead of where I am today. I'd be ahead by nearly 6%.

Did you catch that? Let's repeat it: Over the past month, a fund specializing in selling short common stocks of U.S. companies trading outperformed a fund that seeks investment results that correspond generally to the price and yield performance of the inflation-protected sector of the United States Treasury market by a grand total of 4%. That's not a lot of extra return for the risk taken on if you ask me.

In fact, over 3 years our bear fund friends have seen a mean annual return of -8.75%. The standard deviation of those returns, a measure of risk, is just a bit over 11%. Contrast that to TIP, with a mean annual return of 4.17% and a standard deviation of 3.66%.

What's this all mean? Simply, it means that anyone investing for the long term - people like you and me who are building our portfolios for a healthy and wealthy retirement - would be foolish to stray from our strategy of investing in conservative securities. Long term investors who bank on reasonable rates of return at reasonable risk levels will do well.

If you need more proof than that, just look at this chart. Investors in SPY are almost 73% ahead of where they were ago 5 years ago. Conversely, had you put your money into GRZZX 5 years ago, you'd be out over 60% of that investment today. Keeping an eye on the long term certainly has a way of putting yesterday's market sell off into perspective.