I’ve recently discovered something about myself: I find the rise and fall of the stock market endlessly fascinating. Actually that’s a bit of hyperbole. I just haven’t found an end to my fascination.

As I’ve blogged previously, I’ve invested my retirement and long term savings into some broad mutual (SWERX) and index funds (SWPIX and SWLBX). In both cases, I’ve subscribed to the dollar cost averaging strategy of investing—invest a fixed dollar amount every quarter/month/week ($416.66 every month in the case of my IRA). When the market is high, I automatically buy less shares, when the market is low, I buy more.

For the geeks, think: investing as a cron job.

I should add that doing all this doesn’t take lots of money, or any special knowledge, beyond a little research. It just takes a commitment to yourself to save a little bit of money each month. All I did was open a Roth IRA account at Schwab (which could just as well have been with Fidelity, Ameritrade, my bank, etc.), initiated an automatic monthly transfer from my checking account (which was Wells Fargo at the time) to my Schwab account, and then followed that up with an automatic investment into a mutual fund.

Anyway, towards the end of last year/beginning of this, I’ve watched my retirement account lose 9% of its value, which is pretty shocking in terms of dollar amount (I might be in for a real shock when the market reopens tomorrow)—but who cares, I can’t touch the money until I’m 59.5.

The good news is that as the market plummets, I’ll just end up buying more shares at lower prices each month, which should work out in the long term when the market eventually rebounds (hopefully sometime between now and the year 2040).