stocks, bonds & forex trading - source:
12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, July 19, 2009

Scott Burns is a syndicated columnist and a principal of the Plano-based investment firm AssetBuilder Inc. E-mail questions to scott@scottburns.com.

It's official. The stock market has been a terrible place to be. And not just for a few years, but for decades.

New research from the Leuthold Group, a Minneapolis institutional research and mutual fund firm, indicates that stocks have done about as poorly relative to 10-year Treasury obligations as they ever have.

Yes, you read that right. Ever.

I am not telling you this to rub it in. You don't need to be told that stocks have done poorly for more than a decade.

But knowing exactly how terrible the return on stocks has been relative to bonds may also tell us something about the future. Stocks are more likely to provide higher returns than bonds in the future simply because no extreme lasts forever.

Here's what Leuthold Group researcher Eric Bjorgen did. Taking quarterly data from every period since 1926, Bjorgen compared the performance of stocks, as represented by the S&P 500 index, with the performance of 10-year Treasury obligations over the same period.

He did this for investment periods ranging from one year to 50 years.

source'www.dallasnews.com