For all you folks revealed by your "buy the dips" and "it'll always recover" beliefs....
Isn't there a teeny voice in the back of your mind that says "Beans, Bullets, Band-Aids, and Bullion...RFN!".
Serious question. Serious (as possible, this is APS, after all) answers, please.
Little voice? Sure, back around the 1% section. It's why my emergency preps center around 24 hours to a few months time spans based on likely disasters, and preps are there, but drop off significantly for longer time spans.
If we're talking market or global market crashes, all I can say is that I base my investing on historical data, mathematics, and probabilities. My investments have survived and grown through, several now, "We've never seen anything like this before! The entire first world is affected!" economic meltdowns. Had I panicked and sold all my stock and bond assets for bullets and freeze dried food, well, I'd be sitting on a lot of bullets and freeze dried food, and would have missed out on an average 9% growth of my money over that time period. I would right now still be working because I wouldn't have had enough investment funds set aside to retire.
The people who jumped out windows during the 1920s stock market crash are people who panicked and sold all their assets, or people who weren't diversified and bet the farm on a single, or a few stocks. As bad as that market crash and the "great depression" sound in the history books, lots of people made lots of money in the years following the depression because they held onto their assets and/or invested in a "horrible" market.
Anyway, I live on a farm in a region with some of the best soils in the country, so if everything goes to hell, I can always live off my garden and heirloom seeds. :)