If the thought of opening up your mutual statement makes you squeamish or if you avert your eyes whenever CNBC comes on at the gym, it's understandable.

This has been one ferocious stock market. Not only has Wall Street been flirting with a bear market - conventionally defined as a 20% decline in the major indexes - but we're now in "the second-worst eight-year period for stocks since the 1930s," says money manager Martha Ortiz of Aronson Johnson & Ortiz in Philadelphia.

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