MARRIED TO THE MARKET

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Worried about retirement? Don't be. Little Biff and Betsy are just a few years from college? No sweat. Vacation house? Go ahead. Heck, chuck all your financial concerns, including those about social time bombs like a deficit-ridden federal budget and the financial squeeze on Social Security. Omnipresent and omnipotent, the stock-market god will take care of all.

You just need to keep the faith with your fellow believers: the stock-obsessed masses in mutual funds and investment clubs, trading online and standing in line a dozen deep at the corner Fidelity or Schwab office. Only 10 years since the most devastating one-day plunge in history, Americans are married to the market in confounding degrees. They have the trust of a newlywed that stocks will be a lifetime mate. The average person has more invested in the market than in the house that shelters him. Stocks account for more than 40% of the average household's financial assets, more than in any period in history. The percentage of adult Americans who own stock has risen from 10.4% in 1965 to 43% today.

Stock ownership isn't just a way to better your lot in life; it's a religion that seems ready to unify the planet with a single Almighty. In Wall Street we trust, and trust, and trust some more. Patricia Horst, 62, president of her own business-forms company in a Cincinnati, Ohio, suburb, says every dime of her portfolio is in the market. "Every night when I download the prices on my holdings, I just sit there in awe of all the money I'm making," she marvels. The benevolent stock-market god--the true promise keeper of our generation--is paving the way in green for her to retire in a few years and fulfill a lifetime fantasy of spending six months a year in Europe.

Patricia, do you remember--does anyone?--Oct. 19, 1987, that lose-your-lunch Monday 10 years ago this week when the Dow Jones industrial average plunged 23% and sent shrieks issuing from the canyons of Wall Street? A similar crash today would take the Dow from 8000 to 6160 in a single day. It would hack your mutual-fund balance from $50,000 to $38,500.

As it turned out, the '87 carnage was quickly repaired and never did ripple in a way that would curb consumer spending and dampen the economy, as many feared might happen at the time. Just two years after the crash, the Dow was setting records again and the investing public had learned, rightly or wrongly, to buy when the market drops. The bigger the decline, the greater the opportunity. So goes the dogma of the day, and it is ironic that the greatest one-day plunge ever--the 1929 crash was a mere 12%--was the springboard for today's equity culture, which professes one elixir for every financial ailment: buy-and-hold.

Clearly, the market is a proven wealth builder that can and should benefit all participants in a free-market economy. It's only right that everyone should be entitled to a piece of the action. Scott Sorochak is a 30-year-old Internet entrepreneur in San Ramon, Calif., who has been buying stocks since he was 16. His portfolio today is worth $1.8 million, and he plans to retire at age 40. "We literally go to bed every night laughing at each other over this," he says. Is he taking any chips off the table? Nothing much. "I'm still very bullish."