Funny, but I heard that lyric only yesterday, the day before the twenty year anniversary of, Black Monday, the 508 point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Black Monday saw the Dow lose 22.6% of it's value in a single trading day.

I remember where I was, what I was doing and the shock I felt that day. I had little to my name at the time, but what I had was more money than I'd ever had before. Suddenly it was worth nearly a quarter less than it had been before the weekend.

I was in sales at the time. None of us in the office that day felt much like calling on customers, so we went for an early lunch. It turned into one of those lunches where once the bill's finally been settled you don't go back to the office. Over lunch - there were 5 of us - we all decided this stock market crash wasn't the end of the world. We were all young and brash. Nothing could hurt us, not even a little 23% decline in the stock market.

We all decided we'd "double down." Invest whatever we had available into the stock market. Our logic said that because the economy was strong the market would surely rebound. To a table of 5 young hotshots with good jobs in a growing company, their whole lives ahead of them and a few beers inside of them this looked like nothing more than a golden buying opportunity. The next day I dumped all of what little cash I had straight into the market.

That decision cost me more anguish in the short term, because the market wasn't finished selling off. Over the long term however, the decision to invest and to stay invested has paid off extremely well. The Dow closed at 1738.74 twenty years ago, on Black Monday. Yesterday the Dow closed at nearly 13,889. That works out to about 10.4% per year. By my standards, and probably just about everyone's, that was a really good investment.