Well, this chart pretty much says it all about human beings not being naturally inclined to make good financial decisions.  For those of you that don't like charts, I will summarize - individual investors are prone to sell when they should be buying and prone to buy when they should be selling.  Over the last several years, as stocks have been rising, individual investors have been pulling funds out of stocks (yes, those outflow numbers are in billions!):

Click here for the full article in the Wall Street Journal.