So do you feel like quitting yet?

If Monday’s 800-point intraday plunge in the Dow Jones Industrial Average made you want to give up and get out of stocks, you’re not alone.

I’ve written column after column advising investors to buy stocks on the way down, and readers are in pain. “You say not to bail,” one reader emailed me over the weekend, “but all funds are down. … This whole stock market has me so upset, [I feel] like a deer in the headlights.” Another wrote: “We are, you see, about to enter another Great Depression, just like the last one only much worse. … It’s way too early to be buying stocks. … Or I could be really nasty and ask you which brokerage house paid you to run this stupid column now.”

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