The trend among individual investors is to sell stock mutual funds and buy bond funds at a rather astonishing, but understandable, clip. The Wall Street Journal said today that individual investors sold $33 billion in stock mutual funds through last month, in the wake of a market rebound that trimmed the May/June correction almost by half. It’s the largest bout of capital flight since 2008, at the depths of the financial crisis. Before that, there hasn’t been a flight to quality like this since the 1980s.

While selling into recent strength is, tactically, not a bad idea, the mutual fund sales, this year, reflect increasing disenchantment with the stock market, as opposed to greed and great love for a bond market that yields very little.

Bond market mutual funds continue to attract investor dollars despite the fact that interest rates hover at near record lows. Buying low and selling high works with bond prices, not yields!

In addition to disenchantment and disinvestment, Fidelity Investments says record numbers of individual investors are making “hardship withdrawals” from their 401(k)s, a sign that the nine million Americans receiving unemployment insurance benefits are tapping any source of funds, even long-term savings, to make ends meet.

The moves are all the more striking when one considers that there is roughly $3 trillion in cash in low-yielding money market mutual funds and $11 trillion of cash built up in the U.S. economy, of which $2.2 trillion sits idle on the books of American corporations.

All that cash and nothing to do but park it on the sidelines.

Corporations, by the way, face a strikingly similar dilemma when deciding what to do with their cash hordes. They can park them and wait for the proper time to build new plants and hire people. They can buy other companies, buy back stock or raise dividends, all of which could signal that stocks are attractive, for one reason or another.

But Main Street has stopped paying attention to these Wall Street “fundamentals” so that it may take stock of its own fundamental health which, if you’re not already solvent or wealthy, could be quite precarious.

The Main Street defection from Wall Street has been long in coming. The psychological seeds were sown when the Internet bubble burst in 2000, followed by corporate corruption scandals, and a real estate bubble that further drained household net worth and led to a Wall Street bailout that repaired the banks, but left households badly broken.

These shifts in sentiment can be secular, or long-term, generational events. It’s possible that a whole class of investor may never set foot upon Wall Street again, preferring safety and security to risk and reward.

The problem, however, is that from a secular perspective, stocks may be about a half to two-thirds done with a long-term bear market that, arguably, started with the momentum peak in stocks set back in 1998. If that’s so, there is a case to be made that cash should be going into, not coming out of, the stock market.

Indeed, with the magazine cover declaration that “buy and hold” is dead, a buy-and-hold strategy involving quality stocks may be exactly what individual investors need to employ.

I have never been a fan of the strategy for the short-run, which can be quite dangerous for the individual investor, nor did I subscribe to it during the raging bull markets of the last three decades. Each was punctuated by a major crash in 1987, 2000 and 2007.

But, while I do worry about short-term risk in the market, I believe that in the next 10-20 years, which defines the remainder of my working years, stocks will do better than most people currently believe.

Yes, I worry about technical sell-signals like the “Death Cross,” the “Hindenburg Omen” and other, assorted “crash signals” that have flashed in recent days and weeks.

But, if we get another market meltdown this fall, the typical season of Wall Street discontent, I would recommend that Main Street forget the past, for now, and make a long-term bet on stocks.

As economist John Maynard Keynes noted decades ago, “in the long run, we’re all dead.” But in the time between now and then, we may as well get rich while we’re waiting.