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Tess Vigeland:When volatility is the new normal on Wall Street — down 700 points one day, up 500 the next, down 800 a week later — the first instinct might be to take your money and run.

Well, in this edition of “What are you doing?,” we hear the optimists’ approach.

John Laine: My name is John Laine. I live in Vancouver, WA. I’ve been kind of dabbling in the stock market. I’ve never done it before. It’s been pretty exciting.

I started about a month and a half ago. I started buying up what other people would consider crazy stocks, but I’m having a blast and doing OK at it. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG — these are fundamentally sound companies with flawed business strategies. I think they’re going to be solvent again. WaMu, Lehman Brothers and IndyMac are just calling like sirens to me.

If you went out and bought 5,000 shares of WaMu, it would cost you $200. If it hit a five-year high, that’s $229,000. I’ve spent 943 bucks. You know, it’s not a lot of money, but I own 625 shares of blue chip stock — blue chips that have turned into cow chips recently.

This is probably not good advice to normal people. You know, it’s a gamble. I mean, my wife’s calling them a lottery ticket, but it seemed like a pretty good gamble to me.