After Market's Lost Decade, Now What?

Dec. 29, 2009— -- As the curtain falls on the single worst decade ever for stocks -- a 10-year-period in which shares basically went nowhere -- professional money managers and academics remain wedded to buy-and-hold investing.

From the moment most individuals set up their first brokerage accounts and retirement funds, professional advisors stress the importance of taking a long-term view.

But does the buy-and-hold approach really make sense?

"While the last decade certainly was not a rosy one for stocks, it's still hard to find another asset class that offers investors a better alternative, as far as yield over Treasuries," said William Goetzmann, a Yale School of Management finance professor who has studied New York Stock Exchange-listed companies' share prices going back to the earliest recorded data, nearly 200 years ago.

From the end of 1999 through last week, no calendar decade, even the 1930s, had produced a worse return (-0.5 percent) than the decade about to conclude, according to Goetzmann, whose research was featured in a Wall Street Journal story last week.

"Even a 10-year period like the one we just came out of still is not enough to refute more than 100 years of equity market price history," insisted Jim Swanson, chief investment strategist at MFS Investment Management, an 85-year-old Boston-based money management firm with $181 billion in assets. "In other words, the market tends to reassert itself over time. So while 10 years may seem like a long-term period you really have to take even a longer view."

Some money managers now fear that after the lost decade for stocks, individuals, believing bonds or gold are a better bet, are setting themselves up for a dismal decade to come.

Americans currently hold around $14 trillion in retirement assets, about half of which is in IRAs or employer-sponsored 401(k) plans, according to the Investment Company Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based mutual fund industry lobbying organization.