Denny- I'm sorry to hear about Jim- I hope he is doing ok. I remember reading a lot of his posts back in the day. I'm thankful there are people like him around. I do consider these losses as my "investing 101" and I can see a lot of things that I did emotionally that I never should have done. It's kind of like paying for my education, except I got a lot less out of it than I did my actual degrees! Hopefully these lessons will pay for themselves in the end.

I had a look at the BMW screens at bmwmethod.com - I have positions in C, GE and JNJ. Shouldn't I be THRILLED that they're so low right now? If I liked JNJ 5 years ago at $65 I should LOVE it now. Once I finish The Intelligent Investor I want to look through these three stocks and see if I should still own them. I may not have made any money on JNJ, but I own 15% more JNJ than I did 5 years ago. Not a great CAGR, but better than a lot of my other investments.

Murph- thank you for sharing that post. You sound a lot like Graham! You talk about having a plan, but it's really hard for me to imagine a long term plan at the age of 30. Are you suggesting that if I plan on retiring at say, 60, then I need to figure out what kind of CAGR I need with my current assets and any planned additions and then see if I can create a reasonable plan to do so?

To be honest- I don't want to spend a lot of time on research and watching stock prices. I want to trade infrequently and hold quality companies for a long time and not even worry about my portfolios. I think aiming for companies with dividends is a great idea as I'm thrilled at what JNJ has done over time, even though I'm only up 2.5% on the stock in the last 5 years. I can see what dividends could do over 10, 20 and 30 years without having me do anything but sign up for DRIPS. Also- is there an effective way to dollar cost average at smaller values? If I invested $200 in a company per quarter for example, paying $10-12 per trade is an awful lot.

Graham talks about holding 25-75% bonds - are bonds still worth buying today? I looked into TIPS and it looked like they were near 0.

Good to hear from you both- anyone else still lurking around?