Well here we are, another Monday. Are you wondering where the markets will take you today? Nasty weeks like the one we just had make it hard for even the most tried and true long term investor.

Last week's sell off hurt. By my calculations on one of my favorite benchmarks, SPY, the S&P 500 Depository Receipt Exchange Traded Fund commonly known as Spiders, was down 5.6% last week. That's a lot of gain to give up in a week's time. Someone with a $100,000 portfolio might have seen $5000 vanish without a trace. Five grand would have bought a really nice vacation. Putting it in those terms makes one wonder whether it might be smarter to just take the money and go on vacation. After all, a vacation would certainly be more enjoyable than last week's flogging.

If you look at last week's close from a "where are we so far this year?" point of view, however, the picture looks a little different. By my calculations we're right about in the middle of the extents of our gains and losses this year. Last week's 145.11 closing price for SPY puts us 6.6% off the high for the year and 6.3% higher than this year's lowest close. What makes it seem so painful is that it took us only since the 19th of this month to give up those gains. The low, from which we measure our current position, was all the way back in early March. Ah, if we could only time the market so well... We'd have bought in March and sold earlier this month for a cool 13% gain!

The papers this morning are all full of doom and gloom proclaiming that market futures are down today following the market's worst week in nearly five years. And it's true too. The last time the market was down near as much as last week's sell off was September of 2002.

In terms of rank, last week's sell off ranked 9th among the worst weekly drops in SPY since 1993. The Sept-02 drubbing, nearly 5 years ago, ranks only 8th. The year 2002 was a particularly difficult year for the market. That year there were 3 weeks with drops large enough to rank them in the top ten worst market weeks.

The worst week? Mid-April of 2000, when the dot com bubble implosion spilled over into the equity markets in general. It's hard not to think about the uneasy parallel here between what's been happening in the housing market and what happened in Internet stocks