¡Sell! ¡Sell! ¡Sell!

Now that I got that out of the way, hold your stocks, and if you can, buy more:

Ponies trying to get rich quick on the stockmarket almost always go bust. The shortest timehorizon which should concern one is the decade, preferably, the generation (25 year):

The stockmarket tends to rise about 10% per year with a standard deviation of about 30%. This means that if one is patient, and buy an indexfund (a little of all stocks), one will almost certainly make profit. At the generational horizon, profit is pretty much a sure thing. If your stocks (in a 401K or indexfund or direct ownership (I recommend an indexfund)) will recover in time. In a decade, this will not matter for stocks you own now.

¿Should one stay out of the market now? ¡No!:

Right now, the market is down. That means that the stocks are on sale. Companies will have to cut stockdividends because of cashflowproblems, but they do not want to give the impression of a deathspiral, so they will cut stockdividends less than their stockprice dropped. That means that one will get more stockdividends per dollar if one buys now than if one bought last year.

Given that one should not care about timehorizons less than the decade, the stock will recover, so one gets more stock for the dollar now than an year ago. One gets more bang-for-the-buck if one buys now.

One should not sell now and buy more, if one is in it for the long haul.

7183183 In part I agree with you. As long as the economy exists, stocks will have value. I'm not sure about the currency, though.

Given a choice to be in a currency or in stocks at this time, I'd choose stocks for sure.