Yes, the market is down over the last six months. Oh well...that's what a few really bad days will do to a market where it was mostly pretty good. It's called "investment" for a reason; you're not supposed to be looking at the short-term loss/gain picture.

And if you're old enough that your forward-looking loss/gain picture is a short window of time, you've already enjoyed a lot of upside from past decades of investment. The very nature of investment is that yes, you'll have some bad years. But at least so far, there are way more good years than bad years, so fixating on the current bad year isn't useful. This year is why you started investing years ago, so you could build up your account and be able to weather a storm like this.

Just don't cash out at the current lows, and you'll be fine. Eventually. Probably. (Honestly, I have some skepticism about how sustainable capitalism itself is when you look 25 or 50 years out, but that's a whole other thing. NOTE: this is not a "capitalism is bad" comment; I just think from an economic point of view, our consumerist-driven capitalism system has its limits. My statement is no different than suggesting that we will probably need to find a new place to live sometime in the next 5 billion years.)