rskurtzer

Scott, I just read the excerpt and it looks like a fascinating subject - I live in NYC and a few of my friends are software engineers who help create the tools used in high frequency trading among other things.

My question is, do you think the stock market is a "safe" place for regular individual investors to be in the long term?

So if I'm reading your answer right, this is especially bad for people with short time horizons to retirement. Even with this instability do you think the 30+ year outlook can still be positive? I myself have a pretty diversified 401k and some very minor stock holdings - I'm trying to do things as right as I can (at age 29 now) so that I can actually retire.

Lucky for my parents they have excellent savings on their own as well as a defined benefit pension plan from a very profitable and stable, large public company - I'm on my own.