In every conversation I have these days people worry about their investments and the markets. The economy's killing my investments. My portfolio's down. This economy had better turn around soon or my retirement will never happen. There are many variations on that theme. You've probably been hearing it too. You may even have a version you've been using yourself. It's easy to worry.

Things are tough all over. Nobody's immune. If you've lost money (and you no-doubt have) you're neither alone in your losses nor in your quest to determine when things will turn around.

As for that quest, I can tell you this: Things won't turn around soon. We're on a staircase heading downward and we'll be on it for quite a while. We'll have bad days with big drops in all the indexes and they'll be answered only by moderately good days with gains that don't make up. Mixed in among these will be maddening go-nowhere days where money churns from sector to sector in a quest for value.

I noticed that lately I've been watching my portfolio a little more than usual. If you own stocks, then I bet you have too. Personally I'm looking at more than a 20% gain in my core portfolio in the last few months. When the bulls are running it's hard not to pay attention. Watching that bottom line grow fatter and fatter is a lot of fun.

I've also been sitting on a ton of cash, and regretting that I hadn't invested all of it back in January. There's a little voice inside my head that's telling me to dump it into the market now in order to take advantage of the gains yet to come. Every day the market finishes up the voice grows a bit louder and my feeling of regret grows.

What's keeping me from pulling the trigger? Trees.

I read an interesting post the other day asking the hypothetical question of what do to if a stock you own goes up 20% in a single day. The answer given, of course, is "it depends" and I couldn't agree more. Every situation is different and should be approached as such.

I really got a kick out of the comments. I was surprised to see the fire and emotion this simple hypothetical situation evoked.

Then again, should I have been so surprised? The author's topic combined two equally volatile ingredients, greed and the element of surprise. It proved a potent recipe for eliciting that most basic instinct of self-preservation: the fight or flight response.

But I don't intend to go about analyzing reactions to the post. You should take a few minutes and read it for yourself. Then ask yourself what you'd do. Your answer says a lot about the type of investor you are.

Want to know what I'd do?

Yesterday I wrote about some possible reasons why the stock you bought with great hopes and anticipation for wild appreciation did not in fact appreciate. One of the reasons I offered was that the stock had been bought "into strength", meaning the purchase had been made during a time of price appreciation in that particular stock.

In the article Why did my stock go down?, I wrote:

If so you bought into strength. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; but it does mean you need a lesson in investing discipline. Consider this experience just such a lesson. Learn from your mistake.

One of the key ideas embedded in that paragraph is that of investing discipline.

Discipline is all about having a plan and sticking with it. It's understanding that investing should be a cold and emotionless process. In reality many of us find it nearly impossible to be disciplined investors, to invest without emotion.

• Some of us are just too afraid of losing money. We're risk adverse.