This is a good time to remind ourselves that there is always something to worry about, there are always scary times, and the secret to investment success is to do exactly the opposite of what your emotions are telling you.

Remember this rule: Be greedy when others are afraid, and afraid when others are greedy. This is hard to do, but once you’ve internalized it, you’ll be making money while others are counting losses.

Thanks to twenty-four-hour-a-day business and financial news, CNN, CNBC, Bloomberg, the new FOX Financial Network, and all the print media, we are treated to a parade of talking heads reminding us of all the horrors awaiting us around the next corner.

It’s a good time to calmly assess your financial future, revisiting your planning goals, resisting the emotion fanned by negative events and fear-mongering. It’s a good time to focus on how to transform these events into opportunities for growth, progress, and achievement.

With all the investment noise and media hysteria designed to keep you glued to your set, we have a hard time keeping fear and greed in check. The media is notorious for profiting from the perception of crisis and it is not uncommon for one media outlet to report as good news a story another outlet decides is bad news. The main goal of the media is to grab your attention.

For example, if you lived in San Francisco on September 1, 1998, your day would have begun with this headline in that morning’s San Francisco Chronicle: “PANIC HAMMERS MARKET”. Above the headline were eleven red, downward-pointing arrows showing the bloodbath in selected stocks and indices. Below the headline was a photograph of a trader standing at his desk and holding his head in his hands. Scary times!

But wait! On your way home from work, if you picked up a copy of the afternoon San Francisco Examiner, you’d find another huge headline: “STOCKS BOUNCE BACK, Dow up second-biggest point gain ever”. Happy days are here again!

Nine years later, we’re going through a similar period of uncertainty, which makes the media happy because uncertainty and extreme events attract readers and viewers. This constant barrage is not only absurd, it actually aggravates whatever trend is already in place, making bull markets last longer and bear markets feel worse, and influencing people’s spending and investing choices.

Many of you know my focus has always been to study history to understand the present. The market crises of 1929, 1987, 1998, and today’s mortgage crisis all resulted from excessive use of borrowed money to trade financial instruments so complex no one could figure out what they were worth until they were worthless.

The real culprit is a financial system that has allowed companies to use other people’s money to generate ever bigger returns for their stockholders. The average investor knew the housing boom could not continue forever. But publicly-held homebuilders continued to raise cash by selling stock to investors, and then putting that public money at risk by buying more land to build on even as the housing market began to slow.

Lenders supported this folly by providing public funds and loosening standards for mortgage qualification because they knew they’d be selling off those mortgages and dumping the problem in someone else’s lap. It was not the bank’s money on the line, so nobody cared whether buyers had a prayer of meeting their mortgage payments.

You should invest independently, avoid trends, resist fear and greed, and hire professional money managers to build portfolios that will weather even the worst storms and scary times. We are reminded that slow and steady wins the race.

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