Julie Andrews had a few of her favorite things - raindrops on roses, whiskers on kittens etc. - when she was feeling bad in the Sound of Music. I have my own favorite thing for coping with the bear market. Whenever I kick myself over poor stock market choices - and they all seem to be poor nowadays - I remember an experiment my finance professor performed in business school.

Near the end of the session and, subsequently, the semester, a student asked the question, "If only 20 percent of money managers outperform the index, why doesn't everybody just put their money into index funds?"

The question challenges the value of everything the professor taught over the last four months, basically saying that there is no value in valuing stocks.

Instead of angrily dismissing the question, my professor seemed relieved that the question was posed. It was almost as if he needed to give us this final piece of wisdom before letting us graduate into the cold, dark world of the stock market.

His answer came in the form of an experiment.

He asked the members of the class to remove a coin from their pockets and flip it. Heads you flip again, tails you stop flipping. After seven successive rounds, a class of 45 coin-tossing graduate students was whittled down to a single student.

Before his eighth attempt at tossing a heads, my professor pointed to the remaining flipper and asked the class, "Now, if we were to have a coin tossing contest where the winner received a large cash prize, would you want him to flip for you, or would you want to flip for yourself?"

Against all logic, I felt the urge to hand over my coin to the class champion coin flipper. Against all reason, I was unsure of my ability to compete in a coin flipping contest. Against all common sense, I thought that his flipping ability was superior to mine.

The faces of the rest of the students revealed a similar feeling of doubt. My professor proved his point. We completed our rite of passage into the wide world of Wall Street. After nearly a full semester of learning the various methods for valuing individual stocks, including the dividend discount model and measuring comparables, my finance professor taught us that when it comes to investing, there are no rational decisions, just rationalizations.