If you are looking for a silver lining in the events of recent weeks, how about this one - the latest developments will likely cause significant compression in the market's correction.

I must admit that I was not very optimistic that we would see much improvement in the market before the second half of 2002. My reason for this belief was quite simple. Too many investors were still clinging to the notion that the economy wasn't in a recession and that stocks weren't really in bad shape.

Perhaps the poster child for this mentality were the millions of investors who still believe tech stocks can return to previous levels over the next year or two. The fact that such misplaced optimism was prevalent indicated to me that the market still had to go through more of a bottoming process.

Now, you'd have a hard time finding many investors who are optimistic about the economy or the stock market, especially after the pounding the market took once trading reopened.

How I read that is that what was now a 6-12 month process to hit bottom is now being compressed possible into a few weeks.

While that obviously has meant lots of pain in the short term, it also means that stocks will bottom now much more quickly and have a pretty good chance of actually mounting a sustained rally in short order.