With Stocks Down, Is Now A Good Time To Buy?

(CBS) -- Stocks plunged on Wall Street Monday, but now might be the best time to buy.

CBS 2's Dorothy Tucker reports on what you need to consider before you jump into the market, plus some stocks experts suggest might be worth the gamble.

Gwen Cohen, wealth manager at Morgan Stanley, says it could be a good time to buy for people who "have a risk tolerance that would be appropriate for them."

Risk tolerance? Translation: Do you have the stomach for stocks? According to Cohen, answer yes only if you won't cry after a financial hit.

"If markets were down another 25 percent, am I comfortable holding on?" Cohen said.

If you're comfortable before investing, make sure your debts are low, your savings high and don't expect to profit from your stocks tomorrow.

"You really want to be able to give anywhere from five to seven years to be able to do what it should be doing," Cohen said.

If you only have $1,000 don't buy expensive stocks like Amazon, $463, or Google $589, you can only afford one or two and it's more important to diversify in the unlikely event they crash. And don't buy a stock just because your friend made a killing.

So what should you buy? Kiplinger has a list of stocks that dropped in the plunge and are now considered good buys. Alcoa, Bed Bath and Beyond, Dolby Laboratories, Fluor, Intel, Magellan Midstream Partners, Swift Transportation, and United Rental.

For more information on the stocks, click here.

The biggest piece of advice from financial experts is before you buy any stock, research the company.

Meanwhile, the vice chairman of Chicago's Ariel Investments says Monday was a bad day -- but not a crash. It was a "correction."

"It's always never a good idea to overreact. Most people make the mistake of selling after the markets have gone down and buying after the markets have gone up, and that's the opposite of what you want to do," Charlie Bobrinskoy tells CBS 2's Mike Parker.

At Stocks and Blondes, a bar near Chicago's financial markets, one  young investor says he buys indexed mutual funds and plans to hold onto them until he retires.

"I don't believe I can trade against the stock market and make money relative to the guys who do it 16 hour a day," Jim Morett says.