Evaluate risks, goals when choosing new investments

Call it what you will — a meltdown, a correction or just another day on Wall Street — but Oct. 27, 1997, was a dose of reality. The stock market had been riding high for the past couple of years, and some may have thought it would never come down.After catching a dose of the "The Hong Kong Flu," the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 554.26 points. But contrary to many newspaper stories and television-news reports, this "Black Monday" was not as psychically or financially devastating to most investors as past crashes.
Market watchers predicted a correction in the…