To catch a falling knife

I've been getting my face ripped off trying to catch falling knives.  In my post last Thursday, I said I would not try to catch the falling knife and pick a bottom.  Well, twice since then I have tried and failed to pick the bottom.  I guess thats why this blog is titled dumb money!  I've been doing some dumb things recently regarding my portfolio!  For now, I'm going to leave things alone until the situation calms down.  I had sold about 10 pct of my long term portfolio two weeks ago but have fully reinvested the proceeds recently at lower prices.  I have more cash to deploy if needed, however I am going to wait to see how things shake out going forward.  This type of crazy volatility cannot last forever and things don't go straight down forever.  If it did we would be at zero in less than a month.  I still have 60 pct cash in my trading account.  I do not have confidence that I can trade the crazy intraday volatility so I am just going to stay out.  I do not have much success with shorting either so I won't be doing that.  I have considered going long gold but feel I missed my opportunity.  Two weeks ago, I implored everyone on facebook to buy FUCKING GOLD when it was at 1600!  Unfortunately, I did not do that myself because I was waiting for a lower price.  200 bucks later, I refuse to chase it up although it does look like it's going to 2000.  I'll just keep my AAPL and NLY and hunker down.  I won't be doing anything in my long term portfolio for awhile either. 
Today's action was pretty disappointing... we opened up 150 pts down and quickly dropped to 400 down.  Then we stabilized somewhat and even started moving higher until the last couple hours of trading where we puked up about 300 pts on the DOW.  I really thought that we might recover today after the initial downward pressure as we gained over 200 points from the lows but it was not meant to be.  AAPL and XLE went green and then boom went the dynamite and the bottom dropped out of the market.  We finished some 520 pts down in another very discouraging day in the markets.