There's Even More Reason to Be a Long-Term Investor.

AT a time like this there's something extra to be said for being a confirmed long-term investor.

Nothing makes it easy to watch the stock market absorb so much punishment. But it improves my chances of keeping a lid on my emotions if I'm working from a money-management plan I have vowed to stick with, no matter what.

And you know what? Hanging in there as a long-term holder of stocks or stock mutual funds, though less flashy than stepping into the fray and buying, is an act of confidence and support. Though people don't customarily thank the foundation for holding up their houses, that is what the foundation does.

Since the terrorist attack on the United States, with the huge cost it has exacted in lives and property, even investors of long experience have been buffeted by feelings beyond any they may have encountered before.

"The mood is very somber," said Ray Dalio, who manages $34 billion at Bridgewater Associates in Westport, Conn., in a commentary to clients yesterday. "We aren't in a mood to buy ourselves things, go out for entertainment or do much other than grieve. And of course there are the fears about what will happen."

On paper, a sell-off of these proportions is not unfamiliar. The recent history of the markets is full of tumultuous moments. Many people who lived through the market crash in 1987, when the Dow Jones Industrial average fell 22.6 percent in a single day, acquired a battle-tested attitude that helped them play a bold hand for years afterward.

Not this time

"Buy on weakness" became a bull-market rallying cry. Time after time when stocks encountered temporary sell-offs, it paid to step up and buy.

This time the mood is more subdued. Even so, the bargain-hunting spirit hasn't vanished. "You gotta buy on weakness," said a trader friend last night after buying United Technologies stock - even as it took a one-day plunge of $18.70 to $47.50, by itself knocking 129 points off the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

The main difference this time is obvious. The human cost overwhelms the mind when it tries to get a reading on the economic loss.

For all the compelling news last week, three of the most widely read stories on the Bloomberg Professional service were simply lists of names, the people who were dead or unaccounted for.

On another level, something else was new. In 30 years of writing about investing, I've never seen the idea of buying stocks as a patriotic gesture stir up as much attention as it has these past few days.

With all its appeal as an antidote to fearful selling, though, that impulse too springs from emotion - emotion that may cloud an investor's judgment about what makes sense to buy and why. Over time you can't manage money well like that.

By contrast, there's no emotional charge in an automatic program of regular investments in a mutual fund or tax-deferred retirement plan. It often takes inducements like matching contributions from an employer just to get investors interested in the idea.

Yet such a robotic setup has a great virtue - it saves you the need to make a separate decision, and work up the resolve, each time you put more money at risk. I'll admit, the only money I have added to my stock investments the past few months has been in my 401(k) account - but that has been enough to keep me doing some of what I should do.

Another compelling aspect of the terrorist attack was its suddenness. For all the market's fame as an anticipatory mechanism, no investor had a chance to "discount" this, or take the possibility into account, ahead of time. "This event in my mind reaffirms that timing the market is very difficult," said David Brady, manager of the Stein Roe Young Investor Fund.

"My time horizon is long-term," Brady said. "In a year's time, I believe the world is going to look brighter."

Chet Currier is a columnist with Bloomberg News.

Resist An Urge for Safe-Haven Flight

For anyone with money to manage, now may be the time for touch of blind, unquestioning optimism.

The suggestion may seem grotesque, considering the grim events this month. The toll of innocent lives lost in the terrorist attacks is still being tallied, and the reckoning of the damage to businesses and the economy has just begun.

Financial calculation in the immediate aftermath was the last thing on most minds. Before long, though, a calamity of this magnitude commands the attention of every saver and investor, big or small.

In the securities trading around the world, a predictable move has been seen away from riskier assets and toward perceived safe havens such as U.S. Treasury notes. We always bear about a "flight to quality" when investor confidence is shaken.

The impulse is understandable. In the harsh way these things work, the whole horrific story makes everyone reconsider he risks, financial and otherwise, they are exposed to in life.

Even so, this method of making decisions will never serve as a good investment system -- to flee for safe havens when fearful, events occur, and then to venture out again into riskier securities only when it appears the coast is clear.

Doing that puts me, in financial lingo, on the wrong side of every, trade, buying from and selling to people who are thinking more calmly and farther into the future than I.