Almost all investors will be glad that 2008 is coming to a close.

The bad news is well known.

•    The combination of too much leverage and excessive speculation in the financial and housing sectors has depressed global asset prices more than any time since the Great Depression.
•    Several major financial institutions couldn’t survive; for others, including the Big Three U.S. automobile manufacturers, the future is uncertain.
•    The country is in the midst of tough recession which began in December 2007.
•    Worries are widespread concerning retirement, jobs, housing and the long-term economic health of the nation.

And yet, even in these hard times, there are good reasons to be hopeful.

As winter and a new calendar year arrive, investors are struggling tomake sense of the market and what to do. Many investors are content, ifonly barely, to stick with tried-and-true wisdom and long-termstrategies. But other investors think (or hope) that they can figureout what the market will do and how to take advantage of it.

A crisis that started in Seattle is likely to spread across the country in the coming months as thousands of Washington Mutual employees come to grips with the money they lost because they held the bank’s stock in their 401(k) accounts. That stock became worthless when the bank failed late in September.

When is being lazy good? Ask MarketWatch columnist Paul Farrell.  Here are his portfolio suggestions, and how our portfolio stacks up against other buy and hold or "lazy" portfolios.

Lazy Portfolio Update

Updated November 7th, 2008

Let’s not mince words. The stock market lately has been pretty ugly. In more than 40 years helping people with their money, I don’t think I’ve been through a tougher period than this one. As I write this, the major U.S. stock indexes have dropped about 40 percent in the past year.

Despite what you have been reading and seeing in the news, we are not approaching the end of the world. There’s no question that these are serious, confusing and distressing times. Sometimes it feels as if chaos has gained the upper hand.

It won’t surprise you to read that many of our clients have had a pretty tough time with the market this year. Over and over again, we hear from people who want to take action instead of sitting still. The three most common things people seem to want to do are:

•    Get out of the market immediately and go to cash.
•    Buy commodities and commodity funds.
•    Dump the “dogs” in their portfolios, the funds that have underperformed.