Do you take comfort in the long-term upward trend of the U.S. stock market? Maybe there’s less comfort in that trend than you think. A recent email message from a reader gives five examples worth passing on.

One of our investment management clients is a steel company whose retirement fund we manage a portion of using market timing. The head of this company's human resources department told me a story about what happened right after the Dow Jones Industrial Index plunged over 500 points in a single day in October 1987. The day of that crash, he said, almost all the employees who had discretion over their retirement accounts gave him instructions to get them out of the stock market.

Late in April I had the privilege of taking part in the Sixth Conference on the Psychology of Investing at Harvard University. It left me feeling more convinced than ever of how important it is for investors to follow something other than their emotions.

It’s much too soon to have any historical perspective, but it seems obvious that the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon could prove to be a turning point in American history. One classical definition of “crisis” is a time of change, and the current situation certainly seems to fill the bill.