‘Decrepit decade’ may be worst ever

This decade looks to be one of the worst for stocks since the Great Depression. On an annual-compounded-total-return basis, the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index returned just 0.06% a year for the decade through June, according to Ibbotson Associates Inc. of Chicago. That isn’t much better than the return the index produced during the 1930s, when investors lost an average 0.05% a year. Adjusted for inflation, though, the S&P 500 is down 2.95% this decade — well below the 2.04% real advance during the 1930s when the economy experienced a 2% rate of deflation. This decade is also running behind the 1970s, when the S&P 500 lost 1.41% in real terms, according to Ibbotson. “I call this the ‘decrepit decade,’” said Ron Surz, president of industry consultant PPCA Inc. in San Clemente, Calif. Decades are arbitrary, however, and don't mean much by themselves, financial advisers said. But for some observers, the non-performance of the large-capitalization S&P 500 indicates that the market is in a long-term secular bear market. “I fully believe we're in one of those sideways markets like 1965 to 1982,” said Bill Barack, president of Barack Capital Management LLC of Bay Village, Ohio. “If you were in an index then, you [ended with] exactly what you had going in.”