Whenever there is great volatility and indecisiveness in the directiion there tends to be a change to the trend.
Which way is the market going to go?
I will be funny here and say that I will gaurantee it will go down and it will go up. By the time you have lived another 30 years the market will be at the 100,000 mark on the Dow.
So how do you keep from getting burned. Invest in world corporations that have sound business principles on 95% of your portfolio. Add 5% of your incomoe every year to this portfolio and compound it. When you retire you will have your nest egg.
Now if you are greedy and ambitious you will take risks and win a few and lose a few. Money management is the key to success. Picking the right stocks is luck and skill.
The more you know and the harder you work at productive outcomings the more you will be successful and the ones that are not as successful as you you will call you lucky.
Back to the market, Bernanke is between a rock and a hard place. He can't lower the interest rates anymore because it will cause more inflation. Inflation is finally working it's way into the government statistics. Before you and I felt it but the gov't didn't have the statistics reported proberly to everyday life. They have skewed the stats to keep the Cost of Living down because then they have to pay more out in Social Security payments.
A recession is here but statistics report history so the recession will show up in the stats later. Then thats when the market will bottom just like 2002.
I personally don't think the S&P will make a significant bull run for at least 6 months or even longer so you can keep dollar averaging and know that some day the market will be coming back strong.