There are professions and hobbies in life where being emotional can help you, but investing is not one of them. I simply cannot stress enough how essential it is for an investor to keep their emotions under control. This past week is a perfect example of a week that can lead to a lot of money being lost because an investor gets too emotional. 
When you look at your trading screen and see the Dow plunging by 100 points in less than ten minutes it is a fairly common reaction to think sell right away. In the same way it is human nature to buy when stocks are going up each day. The problem with this strategy is that quite often, investors make the wrong decision when letting their emotions get the best of them.
Investors have to program themselves to be very rational and think things through before making any move. Realize that quite often as the market plunges lower, capitulation sets in. Capitulation defined means the point of surrender or giving up. Hence market capitulation is the point where many investors all at once decide it is time to give up and sell out of their stocks. These investors generally decide that they simply cannot stomach the losses they are seeing in their investment portfolio. When significant market capitulation sets in, history tells us that the bottom for stocks is near. A rational investor is likely to have the ability to buy stocks when these emotional investor are still selling out because they see the market plunging.
The moral of the story is that next time you watch your favorite business news network and hear from all the strategists that the market is doomed and you should get out now, think it over rationally. Its the famous Warren Buffett who coined the great phrase "be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful."
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