[ZenGum]

Hold your cash for a while yet - there is a lot of slide yet to come.

Just echoing what I have read and heard here, but I've read and heard that measured both by price-to-earnings ratios and GDP-to-total-stock-market-value ratios, stock prices are still WAY above the historical norms or averages. I've heard figures of a fall of 30% to 40% still to come, i.e. the Dow Jones (currently between 9,000 and 10,000) could stabilise at around 7,000 or even 6,000.

(And that's before we allow for the irrational "momentum" of markets. The nadir could well be lower.)

I don't think brokers are being irrational in selling now. The market is greatly over-valued, and it will fall. The rational thing to do now is sell before it gets worse, and buy again later. The irrational brokers were the ones who kept buying to drive it so high in the first place.

Ibram, by all means invest early, but be very careful with buying shares for a couple more years. Only buy if there is a clear reason why the company you are looking at is recession-proof. Buying a basket of more-or-less random shares on the grounds that "the market usually goes up" would, right now, be a very bad move.