This has been an epic month. From hurricane Ike to the Lehman bankruptcy, to the hasty deal to sell Merrill Lynch into the arms of Bank of America, not to mention the Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie MAc (FRE) takeover and now the government's assumption of responsibility for insurance giant AIG, the financial services sector has been roiled mightily (see, "When Will The Stock Market Madness End?").

But all is not the dark that those talking heads on CNBC like to portray.

For instance, did anyone mention that Merrill Lynch (MER) was sold at a premium, about $10 more per share than they were trading for when the deal was announced? And what about the fact that after Lehman was left for dead, Barclays swooped in on vultures' wings and snapped up a goodly piece of the company and the jobs that go with it?

Before Thursday's 410-point gain in the Dow, that index was down 25.1% below the high set last October. Sounds tough, right?

We've Seen This Before and Survived

Wait a minute: Travel back to 2002. In early October, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell to a close of 7286, putting it 37.8% below the high set almost three years earlier. It felt horrible, but my subscribers and I stayed the Vanguard course, and boy, did we make some money when the market turned. If this is all the market's going to hand us—a 25.1% decline from the high—well, okay, I can handle that. You should be able to as well.

This meltdown in the financial sector, writ large in the meltdown of the stock markets, has an eerie déjà-vu feel to it. No, it's not that there were investment banks blowing up and mortgage and insurance giants being taken over by the Feds the last time around. But there were huge values in the stock market disappearing, and investors who'd tanked up on them were decimated in the fallout. It's not surprising, of course, because those who were hurt the most were those who bought into the new, new mantra that said tech is good and all else is bad (see, "Three Tips to Survive a Recession"). But by the time that bust was nearing its nadir, all manner of world-ending hypotheses had been proposed, and yet one year later, they'd all been disposed.

Stocks were diving, and investors were scurrying for the safety of U.S. Treasuries. The yield on the...