When I first learned about the stock market -- and this goes back to the go-go years of the 1960's -- Wall Street "experts" were preaching a buy and hold, long term strategy. Back in those days you bought such stocks as General Motors and General Electric and Con Edison and Chrysler and Ford and you held them forever.

Of course that changed after the crash of 1987 when analysts and financial advisers realized that even the baby can be thrown out with the bathwater. And after that October massacre advisers were telling their clients that "it's OK to sell your stocks because they are not your children and they are not members of your family."

And since 1987 we certainly have gone through several bull and bear cycles. And so I ask, are there still any long term, buy and hold, investors out there? Or have the remaining stock market investors become "traders" who won't risk holding a stock too long? And at the opposite end of long term investing, have we become a nation of day traders?