It’s getting a lot more brutal out there, with all signs pointing to a further erosion of stock prices following a nearly 17% drop in the S&P 500 from its all-time high in October.

For the third time in the past six trading sessions, the stock market on Friday was buffeted by hurricane weather, another triple-digit decline in the Dow. The latest skid, 146.70 points, comes on the heels of wicked Dow declines of 214.60 on Thursday and 315.79 on February 29. That’s a total three-day plunge of 679.09.

The latest culprit was the disclosure of more economic ill tidings, a disappointing loss of 63,000 jobs in February, and swelling housing foreclosures and delinquencies. To make matters worse, liquidity tracker TrimTabs Investment Research of Santa Rosa, Calif., fired off a release to its institutional clients that its latest data indicate that March will produce another horror show on the employment front — an additional loss of 150,000 to 200,000 jobs. Technical deterioration is yet another ominous sign according to some market watchers. Friday’s Dow wrap-up of 11,893.69 broke below its January 2008 low of 11,971.19, thereby confirming the existence of a bear market and potentially signaling a further Dow fall to about 11,500,

With overseas markets also getting bashed — the average global stock fund is down about 10% this year — what should jittery investors do?

“You either fish or cut bait, and for the next few months, you’ve got to be stupid not to cut bait,” a Los Angeles money manager, Arnold Silver, tells me. “You don’t stand in front of an avalanche or a steamrolling freight train; you either run away or you get killed.” Mr. Silver recalls that when he was young, he used to play hide and seek. “Someone would run away and hide and I would seek them out. That’s the way investors should approach the current market. It’s a time to hide and seek refuge in Treasuries and money market funds. You won’t make a bundle, but you also won’t get killed.”

Nearly every money manager is looking for new money. Not so Mr. Silver, whose firm, A. Silver Associates, manages a little more than $110 million of assets. “You take new money now and your clients expect you to put it to work right away to make up for this year’s losses. I won’t do it,” he says. “I won’t take any new money now because logic is practically shouting at us that this is the wrong time to buy. If people insist I do some buying, and some clients have pushed me to do that, I suggest they go elsewhere.”

So far this year, Mr. Silver is outperforming the market with a below-average 4.2% decline. The reason: heavy cash reserves, currently just under 30% and perhaps headed to 40%, he says.

Disputing the oft-heard comment from television’s array of financial experts and some of his peers that stocks are cheap and all the bad news is already mirroring current stock prices, Mr. Silver counters: “We’re looking at hell ahead, a bunch of earnings disappointments, a deepening credit crisis, an economy that everyone agrees is going to get worse, and for sure more subprime write-offs around the globe. The pressure from such events is bound to drive stock prices lower. Yeah, I guess if you want to look five years out, maybe it’s okay to do some selective buying, but I personally wouldn’t do it now because I think you will soon be able to buy for less, maybe 7% to 10% less.”

To believe that it’s okay to do some buying now, he goes on, is to believe the credit and housing markets will rebound in the second half. “I know that’s Wall Street’s party line, but where is the firm evidence to support such an optimistic conclusion?” he says. Mr. Silver adds: “If Wall Street should get the idea serious housing and credit problems will persist through the rest of the year, the market will get smashed even more.”

I also get a flashing red light from TrimTabs, whose global market analyst, Vincent Deluard, says, “We would be 100% out of equities and put the money into money-market funds.” Over the next two or three months, he sees a steady serving of bad news, notably increasing fundamental weakness in a slowing economy, such as an accelerated slowdown in consumer spending, and more real estate bankruptcies.

Heightening market woes is an increasingly jittery investing public. The latest figures from TrimTabs show that investors unloaded $16.2 billion worth of equity mutual funds in the week ended March 5, a huge increase from the prior week’s outflows of $2.4 billion.

In other words, the public is scared stiff. Who can blame them?

dandordan@aol.com