Legendary US investor Warren Buffet's advice "be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful" got dragged out so many times this week that by Wednesday, it was starting to sound tired.
However, Buffet's company, Berkshire Hathaway, is reckoned to have amassed about $50 billion (€34 billion) from investing in stocks, so it's probably a bad idea to ignore anything he says on the subject.
And this does make sense, in the same way that stocks can get overvalued when everyone jumps on the bandwagon and starts buying, they get undervalued when everyone jumps off again. That situation should present shrewd investors with a chance to make a profit.
It looked like one of Buffet's fans was active on the Irish Stock Exchange in Dublin, because something almost unusual happened there - it fared better than the rest of Europe.
When panic set in on Monday, European markets lost around 5 per cent, which was estimated to have wiped €240 billion off the total value of its top listed companies. The Irish market dipped by 4 per cent. This meant that the companies quoted on it saw their value shrink by around €3.5 billion.
But they clawed most of this back on Tuesday, barely lost anything on Wednesday and recovered strongly on Thursday. The pattern became so marked that one share dealer declared that "the Irish market is pulling the world back from recession by its bootstraps".
He was joking. But it was clear that some investors believed that there was value to be had in Dublin. Eugene Kiernan, head of multi-manager investing in AIB Investment Managers (AIBIM), says that during the turmoil, there was a lot of "indiscriminate" movement in the price of individual Irish stocks and buying and selling were not necessarily in line with what the market was doing. "That shows that people think that there are worthwhile opportunities in the Irish market," he says.
One theory is that the Irish Stock Exchange had its bout of fear last year. During 2007, every €100 invested in the market lost €26. The performance was the worst in Europe. According to Chris Johns, head of global strategy at Bank of Ireland Asset Management, at least one group of investors now believes it is time to get greedy here again.
Hedge funds, investment funds that make their money by literally "hedging" their bets across various markets, are re-entering the market. Last year, they sold - or in their jargon "went short on" - Irish stocks, and bought or "went long on" the Spanish stock market, which was cashing in on a boom in South America. This year, according to Johns, they have switched positions, and are long on Ireland and short on Spain. As evidence, he points out that Spanish stocks fell by three times the European average on Monday.
Hedge funds often make money by judging when it's right to do the opposite to everyone else. One man who said this week that he was taking the contrarian approach, and quoted Buffet's adage to back him up, was Conlon & Co principal Seán Conlon, an Irish emigrant who has built a billion-dollar real estate empire in the US over the past three decades.
He told the Irish Property Developers' Conference that there was never a better time to invest in the US, whose supposed slide into recession sparked this week's market panic. Conlon pointed out that he has made money by buying property during various economic downturns.
He argued that the US economy is stronger than it was when the technology bubble burst in 2001, sparking another stock market crisis, and that it has displayed plenty of resilience in the face of disasters like 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. Conlon told the conference that US recessions last an average of 11 months, and bullishly declared that "if there is a recession, it will be over before they announce it".