How to Face Up to Buying the Dips

All investors are the prisoners of their past, and that shapes how they face the future.

Until the past few weeks, stocks had resembled a perpetual moneymaking machine, rising smoothly for nearly all of a decade and a half. From March 2009 through the peak this January, U.S. stocks gained more than 800%. The pandemic panic of February and March 2020 lasted only five weeks.