WASHINGTON (Reuters) - If you're losing sleep over the stock market, you're not alone. Volatility has gone through the roof, while prices have gone the other way.

It was the worst May in almost 40 years for U.S. stocks, and included several days of 200-plus point swings in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. One day the Dow plunged almost 1,000 points in an hour, and another day it fell more than 200 points in the opening two minutes. It's not over, either.

"Nervous investors and slowly receding uncertainty levels will keep market volatility high over the coming month," Bob Doll, chief equity strategist at investment management firm BlackRock, said on June 1, echoing the sentiments of many other market watchers.

There is an index that monitors stock market volatility. Colloquially called "the VIX," it is an index of options contracts on the Standard & Poor's 500 stock index designed to predict S&P volatility over the next 30 days. And it's high right now. After bouncing around mostly below 20 for the first four months of this year, it spiked over 40 twice in May and remains in the mid 30s. We can expect more of the same.

Conventional wisdom holds that individual investors should not do anything about volatile markets; we are just supposed to buy and hold -- and hold, and hold, say the experts. That's not entirely wrong. Individual investors

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