Last week's record volatility in U.S. stocks ended after four days. The anxiety it instilled among mutual-fund investors may linger for years.

Investors pulled a net $23.5 billion from U.S. equity funds in the week ended Aug. 10, the most since October 2008, when markets were reeling from the collapse a month earlier of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., the Investment Company Institute said yesterday. The period tracked by the Washington-based trade group included three of the unprecedented four consecutive days in which the Standard & Poor's 500 Index rose or fell by at least 4 percent.

The roller-coaster ride was unnerving for fund investors who have already endured the bursting of the Internet bubble in 2000, a 57 percent collapse in the S&P 500 Index (SPX) from October 2007 to March 2009 and the one-day plunge in May 2010 that briefly erased $862 billion in value from U.S. shares. The debacles, combined with falling home prices, unemployment above 9 percent and a lack of trust in government to bring down spending, may sour individual investors on domestic stock funds for an additional three to five years, according to Andrew Goldberg, a market strategist at JPMorgan Funds in New York.

"You can't keep having bombs, so to speak, go off," Goldberg said in a telephone interview. "If the second you walk outside another one goes off, you're going to stay inside for longer, and that's what's going on."

David Fuller's view Bear markets tend to drive away novice investors. If there is a developing trend among many others, I think it will make them less inclined to pay expensive fund management fees and more inclined to manage their own money.

Savvy investors see bear markets as valuation resets. The best investment advice you will probably ever hear is: Buy Low, Sell High.