Well, just a short and simple lesson for hysterical children today because I used to be one of them.

Hi, everybody. I'm Bill Little here with Steve Green and Scott Ott, and today we'd like to talk just

very briefly about the stock market and what the stock market is and what the stock market isn't,

since it's the topic de jour for the week that the stock market has fallen dramatically and the world

is close to disaster and economic ruin faces all of us.

Gentlemen, I was one of those people once who bought into that idea that when the stock

market crashes, that's the end of the economy, and so on.

And so there were two things that somebody explained to me about the stock market.

And I thought I'd just ask each one of these questions, just for the small percentage

of our viewers that don't really understand some like fundamental truths about the stock market and stock market volatility.

So Steve, I'll start with you with the easy one.

Let's say you have a stock and you bought it at $ dollars a share and you own one share.

And all of a sudden the economy starts, the stock market rather, starts getting very volatile and your $100 share is worth $92 and you check the next day it's worth $87 and it's worth $73.

It's worth $62.

And by the time it gets down to $50, you start thinking, oh, my God, you know, this thing is

heading for the ground. So you sell it at 50, you've lost $50 worth of value when you sell

that share. If you don't sell the share and you ride out these crashes of which we've had

five or six since the Great Depression, and you wait a year

and the entire market recovers, you've still got a share that will eventually go back up to

100. You haven't lost a damn penny, have you? I know this sounds fundamental, but sometimes

people need to hear it. And this is a lesson I actually learned when I was 18 years old.

I was a freshman at Missou when Black Monday happened.

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