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I am sitting here today looking at the Dow Jones industrial average sitting around 8,500 and thinking about the cash I still have on the sidelines waiting for an opportunity to buy. I am thinking, OMG! Am I missing the opportunity? The market and stocks are going up and will only go higher from here!

Nonsense! The market and equities will not just go up. And as investors, the last thing we need to be thinking is that we may have missed an opportunity to get back in and recoup some of our losses. Market envy and the feeling of a lost opportunity are killers when it comes to investing. Personally, I feel that disciplined investing is more important now than it has been in a very long time. If we subscribed to and followed the idea of a diversified investment portfolio, we still have some money to invest and we are not yet forced to sell pencils. And because most everything went down last year, the last thing we want to do now is chase after “missed opportunities.” If we let our emotions be our financial adviser, we had better have a few cases of pencils to sell.

We have seen the overall economy and most of our portfolios do nothing but increase for the past several years. We must all be geniuses! Don’t get me wrong; most of the readers of the Business Record are geniuses. However, most of the upward trends we saw were because of momentum. We all went along for a great ride. Now, our ride is stalled on the side of the road with a couple of flat tires, and we need to get out and push.

I believe that we still have a good deal of correcting to take place in all of the markets. The billions of dollars we spent and many of the policies that have been implemented will have a positive effect. It is too soon to see it. We have a major commercial real estate issue coming and a lot of debt to be repaid by all of the initial public offerings done in the past 10 years. We have not quite paid the piper yet.

So, if you feel like you are missing an opportunity and simply must buy, do it slowly and cautiously. Take on smaller positions where, if it does go your way, you are participating, but if it moves the wrong way, you are not dramatically adding to your losses.

Patience is your friend.

Daniel Ochylski represents commodities trading, private equity and real estate firms.