Make money when stocks stink
Bear markets are Darwinian: They kill weak investors, but the strong get rich. And as we are learning anew in this decade, bear markets can be both grueling and extremely, extremely long. For the U.S. stock market, the 1960s and 1970s were Lost Decades, and the current one is about as bad. The major indexes, in fact, have been trading lately well below their levels of 10 years ago. These Lost Decades include monster bear markets -- those of 1973-74, 2000-02 and 2007-present -- during which the S&P 500 Index ( $INX ) plunged more than 40% each time. Those are the only such monsters since the Great Depression, and two of them have come in this decade. And the immediate future, at least, looks even more perilous. When the S&P 500 was at its low of 855 on Friday, it was 45.8% below its peak of October 2007, and foreign markets have recently been battered even worse than our own. The headlines have described a "global panic." The good news: Some investors have managed to p...