Back in October, in the midst of the market panic, I wrote a series of articles that encouraged readers to stop and think, to take a moment to acquire a little perspective before frantically dumping their stock portfolios. The key point of all of those articles could be summed up as: Don't panic. Panic is expensive.

It's amazing how panic leads people to make exactly the wrong decisions.

Do you really want to buy high and sell low?
Panicked people buy good stocks high because they're afraid of missing the boat, and sell them low to cut their losses. Panic-prone people jump on trends too late and buy "hot tips" from some guy their Uncle Charlie met in a bar, all without doing any research.

And when they do do something that's arguably right, like buying big-name stocks like Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) at $40 in the middle of a market meltdown, they screw it up by selling -- yep, in a panic -- when it hits $35 a few days later.

Panicked investors, in other words, are those who react to events -- specifically, to their emotions about events -- instead of following a plan. They're the essence of the stereotypical "retail investors" that Wall Street brokers claim can't manage their own money.

What they do, in other words, is fail to buy low and sell high -- or put another way, to buy well and hold for the long term.

So, about that "buy and hold" thing …
For years (and years and years), the best advice for long-term investing success was "buy and hold," maybe even "buy and hold forever." Fool co-founder Tom Gardner recently cited the example of Shelby Davis, who turned $50,000 into $900 million over 50 years by buying good companies he knew well -- mostly insurance companies like American International Group (NYSE: AIG) -- and holding them for decades.

Davis is relatively famous, but any wealth manager who deals with "old money" families can cite dozens of other smaller-scale examples. I know of a few myself -- folks whose great-grandads made a bit of money and bought stocks like General Electric (NYSE: GE), Bank of New York (NYSE: BK), or Consolidated Edison , solid dividend-paying companies, and built fortunes by holding (and reinvesting those dividends) for many years.

Tom Gardner has argued that if you can't refrain from making any trades while watching your portfolio take huge dips, or hang on through several years of no gains, or discipline yourself to do serious fundamental research and keep investing through good and bad markets, a long-term buy-and-hold approach isn't for you.

There's a lot to be said for Tom's argument. But I'm going to go out on a limb and quibble with one of the Founding Fools: I say that buy-and-hold alone isn't for you.

Buy and hold, but better
If there's one thing we humans do well, it's adapt to circumstances. Here we are in a time of great volatility and uncertainty. How do we adapt "buy and hold" to a time of uncertainty and volatility? How do we work around our own inclination to panic? Continued...