As I write, the Colorado sun is rising on the fir-racked mountains, and glinting off the lake below – brighter even than a CNN spotlight off Sarah Palin's spectacles. The setting? No, not Walden Pond, but the RightNow user conference at Broadmoor (the Springs resort, not the prison).

A bull's head* is pinned above the hotel entrance, and yesterday several jeeps full of customers went bear-spotting in the hills.

Anyone thinking this might be one of my legendary metaphors for the stock market would be right. Last night there was a hoedown; this morning there are sore heads (there I go again).

In an hour's time the SaaS company's CEO Greg Gianforte will gather analysts and journalists (none of whom drink, that would be madness at this altitude...) for what's billed as a 'fireside chat'; in fact, it's a press briefing off the main conference hall, replete with pre-submitted questions.

But that won't stop me asking about RightNow's Q3 payment-terms statement yesterday, issued while customers were straining for a glimpse of the grizzlies in the world's biggest back yard.

Gianforte said that negative cashflow from operations in the quarter is “primarily due to a lengthening of payment terms and slower cash collections.”

RightNow expects to reduce its full year guidance for cash from operations. “We are seeing more contracts with periodic or annual payment terms and slower cash collections which we believe are both being driven by recent economic conditions,” he said.

In other words, customers are holding onto cash for longer and not paying up front.

SAP's profit warning also hit the market yesterday, and the buy/sell notices are being rewritten for Salesforce.com's stocks even as I speak.

This double whammy of negative news pulled tech stocks down, with bleak news from the client/server enterprise behemoth, and from its leaner, meaner cloud-computing rivals.

What we are witnessing, of course, is the economics of fear: the more we fear an outcome, the more we act to make it happen. It's a form of 'butterfly effect', one small causal movement whips up a tornado of effect.

You know that when a company such as General Electric issues statements that its short-term finances are solid (in fact, propped up by Warren Buffet) then the economy has been turned on its head and is being spanked until all the loose change falls out. (Indeed, the White House is now funding short-term debts.)

So it's time to concentrate on the real economy, and stop obsessing about share movements. There have been 23 bear markets in the past 75 years or so; we are in them one-third of the time.

Stop hunting those bears: they have bigger teeth than you. If you leave them alone, they will leave you alone.

* OK, I admit it: it's a bison.