The last five years: Quite a ride, but did you stay in it?

On March 9, 2009, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 6,547.05, which was, at the time, its lowest close in 12 years. That night, like many nights back in the height of the crisis, people went home wondering: How much lower it could go?

As it turned out, that was the bottom, and if you had bought that day, you probably did very well. Here we are five years later and the Dow is over 16,000, which would have been unthinkable on that March day back in 2009.

That five-year ride has been bumpy both in the U.S. and abroad. Nearly everyone has been touched by the crisis in some way. The unemployment rate in the U.S. reached 10.2% in October 2009 and the yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury Note reached all-time low close of 1.43% in July 2012. Through unprecedented intervention from the