For stocks it sure seems like it. On the front page of today’s (12/20) Money & Investing Section of the Wall Street Journal, there is a great visual bar chart of stock market returns by decade. Guess which one ranks dead last? The 2000′s ending December 15, 2009. Its annualized decline of -.5% per year so far eclipses even the declines of the 1930′s! Similarly, the November 24th issue of Time Magazine ran a cover story called “The Decade from Hell.”

We’d like to think with improving (but not great) fundamentals and lower (but still not screamingly cheap) valuations, stocks are set up to do better in the next ten years than the last ten (not a high bar!). So if ever there was a time to say  “out with the old and in with the new”, this would be it!

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