Are you paying any attention to your retirement savings? Do you have it in cash or an account with a broker? Maybe you have a professional manager who is investing your money as you add to it every month.

When will the stock market stop going down and start up again? If we knew that wed all be jillionaires. So what do you do now while stocks are going down and stealing away your money every day?

In 1960 an engineer working for a watch company in Switzerland discovered that a small crystal would vibrate at a constant rate. He found this was so accurate that it could be used to calibrate time so he took it to company management and said it would make an entirely new kind of watch that had no springs and no gears. They could not imagine who would want such a thing. Swiss watches dominated world commerce. They did not even bother to patent it.

Now that you have some money burning a hole in your pocket and the stock market is going up you have decided to buy some stock or maybe a mutual fund, but you have the momentous decisions to what to buy.

At this point you have three decisions to make besides which equity to buy:

1. How much to buy.

2. When to buy.

3. When to sell.

Where is the beef? Or maybe it should be where is the bull? Market, that is? The chief investment strategists and analysts of the major brokerage houses have been promising us a new bull market.

So far the bull hasn't come in from the distant pasture.

Some of the cows have been wandering back. I see stocks and mutual funds with names like Small Cap Value, Real Estate, Leisure Group and Gold, but all the rest of the herd are not coming to the barn. If you look at the herd, as scattered as they are, they don't seem to want to participate in any kind of a bull move.

The Shadow knows. Remember him? It seems a shadow has a firm grip on this stock market. Since the terrible break in mid-April we had a rally and then a decline. Trying to choose a suitable stock or mutual fund has been like grasping at shadows.

Two great Wall Street gurus, Elaine Garzarelli who manages multimillions of investors' dollars and George Soros, king of the hedge funds, each have a different take on the future.

On November 17 I bought 7 different mutual funds and went to a 100% invested position. One of the funds I bought was Robertson Stevens Information Age (RSIFX) and it has made money as have the other six.

There are so many kinds of work that needs to be done and you are doing one of those jobs right now unless you are one of those two and a half million that have been laid off during the past 3 years. The press continues to blame China and India for stealing away all these forms of employment, but they dont have it right.

Many of the unemployed have been sent to train for new jobs and, unfortunately, the government in its infinite wisdom is training folks for high tech computer related work the kind that is being outsourced to foreign lands.

Wall Street has been preaching for years and years to investors how and where to put their money. The experts have put forth these ideas for so long that they seem to be carved in stone just like Moses did with Gods 10 Commandments. The only difference is that what Wall Street preaches is lies that will make you broke.

It will be difficult in this short space to elaborate on them, but please stop and give a long think to all of these commandments.

Last time we looked at the real performance of the stock market (we used the Dow Jones as a reference point) and the apparent performance that makes the headlines and can be seen by a casual look at a chart or "ballpark" figures - briefly; the Dow went up, for example, less than 50 points between April 1999 and April 2005 - essentially 6 years with no growth!

But behind that seemingly "becalmed" Dow there were at least 10 significant moves each and every year totalling many thousands of points!