It's just focusing on the long-term, focusing on what your goals are. Stocks are going to do what they do day-to-day, week-to-week. You're not going to make money selling in and out frequently, it's to stick with it long term. This is the best long-term generational wealth-building tool we have. It's just knowing that the fact that you're investing in the stock market is a good sign. Patel: I think the thing that keeps me levelheaded, especially when there's a 24-7 news cycle of these days. Brian, like you said, I think it's funny when news outlets, they'll say, the markets had its best day since it rained on a Tuesday last year or something like that. He says in the short-term, the market's a voting machine and in the long-term, it's a weighing machine. One Ben Graham quote that I really like, for those not familiar, he was just called the father of value in investing and was Warren Buffett's teacher, I think at Columbia. I look at them once throughout the day and I think that shields me from overreacting to any bad news that's going on.

Something that I do, I don't really check my positions first thing in the morning or whatever. You have to be able to stomach the day-to-day, the month-to-month, even the year-to-year ups and downs. To echo what he just said, volatility, that's the admission to get market-beating returns. Neil Patel: Yeah, I agree with a lot of what Demitri said. If you take that approach, the six-month decline is not going to bother you as much. Another great reason why you shouldn't really put money into the market that you are going to need in the next six months or the next year it's this is money for three years, five years, 10 years, 20 years retirement stuff. I don't think we've ever had a 10-year period of losses. But I have really good odds of earning solid returns over three years, five years, 10 years. I have a good chance of losing money over the short-term in say, a year or two, and that's short-term. Individual stocks, by definition, are going to move more than the market itself, so I have a very real chance. Basically, I'm signing up for that volatility that's at least as bad as the index, but probably a bit worse because I own a lot of individual stocks were just talking about that. Then, of course, like I said, if we zoom in a little bit, we've also had to sit through that, I think the S&P dove about 20 percent in just a couple of days in the first phase of the pandemic.ДЄs an investor, I think about what I'm signing up for. Even in this unusually great 10-year stretch, out of those 10 calendar years, we had three of those years, we were below that 14 percent average, and three were below five percent. They call that the average return over the last 10 years, which is way better obviously when you could get in your bank account or in CDs, or bonds, or real estate in most cases.Д«ut to get those better returns, I think we've had to sit through a lot of painful dips, and sometimes those last for weeks, like they did last year, sometimes they last four months, sometimes they last for a year. S&P 500 has averaged, I was looking at an article actually written by Jason Hall that highlighted a few of these numbers, it's up about 14 percent annually over the last decade.

I guess I think of it this way that volatility is the price we pay for superior returns. I'll start off by saying down days are not as fun as the up days for sure. The question for you guys is, are you seeing similar trends? How do you deal with it on days or stretches of days where you're seeing red numbers, do you worry? How do you deal with the volatility? Demitri, we'll hit you up first.Дemitri Kalogeropoulos: Sure, yeah. I'm wondering if some of our members are feeling this too. At least for the daily change, not for the long term, but for the daily. A number of days, I would open my portfolio and I would see nothing but stocks in red numbers. But tech stocks and some of our Fool favorites seem to be taking it on the chin over the past week or so. But today I looked at it, it was floating around zero. The market was up 1.2 percent, the S&P 500 was up 1.2 percent. I'm going to start out with the lead here yesterday, and I love how the financial media does this, yesterday was the best day for the S&P 500 since July.

Demitri and Neil are going to stay on and Jason adds to the fun. Really stellar, no matter how the market did today over the last 10 years, it's done super well. Brian Withers: The S&P over the last decade up 380 percent.

Keep it down