If you hold onto stocks for a long time, then you agree with Siegel.

As author of Stocks for the Long Run: The Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns and Long-term Investment Strategies, Siegel has been described as the "high priest" of buy-and-hold investing in stocks. The bear market of the last three years hasn't shaken his belief.

"Buy-and-hold says that the return on stocks has beat all other assets over 20- to 30-year periods," Siegel recently told Business Week. "What confuses me about people saying buy-and-hold doesn't work any more is that it has been tested through periods very much like this over the last two centuries. ... The smart money, looking forward from today's levels, not from two years ago, will say stocks are reasonable. Relative to earnings, they're reasonable investments."

Siegel likes to point out that stocks have provided the best returns since 1802. People who need money soon -- as in, within five or six years -- shouldn't be in the stock market, he believes.

In addition to Stocks for the Long Run, Siegel co-wrote Revolution on Wall Street, The Rise and Decline of the New York Stock Exchange. He is a columnist for Kiplinger's Finance, and has written for The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, and The Financial Times, among others.

Populist writing hasn't dulled his academic edge over the years. The 1992 Graham and Dodd Award for best article in The Financial Analysts Journal went to Siegel, as did the 2000 Peter Bernstein and Frank Fabozzi Award for best article in The Journal of Portfolio Management.

Siegel is the Russell E. Palmer Professor of Finance at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated from Columbia University in 1967, received a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1971, and spent one year as a National Science Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellow at Harvard University. Siegel taught for four years at the Graduate School of Business of the University of Chicago before Wharton hired him in 1976. He was head of economics training at J.P. Morgan for 15 years and is currently the academic director of the U.S. Securities Industry Institute.

Back to the top

Paulsen sits at the opposite end of the investing spectrum from Jeremy Siegel. While the latter still believes buy-and-hold investing in stocks is the surest way to financial prosperity, Paulsen sees a volatile, up-and-down environment best-suited for traders, rather than the gradually rising market that benefits long-term shareholders.

"That doesn't mean you can't have good years," Paulsen told the San Francisco Chronicle last year. "But in five years the market may not be a lot different than it is now."

He's as likely to know as anyone, given his credentials. Paulsen was BusinessWeek's Most Accurate Forecaster of 2001, and BondWeek's Interest Rate Forecaster of the Year in 1998 and 2000. Paulsen has spent 20 years on Wall Street, including jobs as chief investment officer for Norwest Investment Managemen and chief investment strategist for Investors Management Group.

Back to the top

Bonds have been among Wall Street's best investments since the bear market started three years ago, and Loomis Sayles Bond Fund has picked them better than most of its peers. The fund, co-managed by Gaffney and Daniel J. Fuss, posted a total return of 19.3 percent over the past 12 months, making it the top gainer of its Morningstar category for that time period. Loomis Sayles Bond also has the group's best 10-year annualized return, 9.87 percent. Since Gaffney became co-manager in 1997, the fund has posted an average annual gain of 6.47 percent, fourth best among its peers.

"Loomis Sayles Bond continues to prove its worth to adventuresome investors," Morningstar said in a report published two months ago. "Although the fund's stake in junk bonds, which accounted for more than a fourth of assets at the end of November 2002, was a drag on performance, the portfolio benefited greatly from management's tendency to court more interest-rate risk than its typical peer in the multisector bond category. ... Investors who have endured the fund's price swings have been handsomely rewarded, though."

Gaffney in recent months has seen plenty of cheap targets among corporate bonds -- especially those from cyclical companies, she told The New York Times, which profiled the fund in December. At the time, Loomis Sayles Bond had 28 percent of its assets in junk bonds, and 15 percent in overseas securities.

At the end of last year, the fund's top holdings included bonds from: Loews; the International Bank for Reconstruction & Development; Analog Devices; Fannie Mae; Freddie Mac; Time Warner; the Brazilian, Norwegian and Canadian governments.

Loomis Sayles hired Gaffney in 1984. She has a bachelor's degree from the University of Massachusetts.

Back to the top

If people like Delaney get their way, betting action will move from plain old gambling to professional-style futures trading.

Delaney's business, TradeSports.com, transforms sports betting into a commodity exchange. Instead of charging a vig and setting a betting line, the site functions as an exchange that charges 4 cents per trade and makes a market in almost anything in the news, ranging from sports to politics to war. For example, June 30 Saddam futures -- as in, "Saddam Hussein is not President/Leader of Iraq by 30th June 2003" -- were trading at $76 on March 13.

Given Delaney's background, perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that his Internet betting business seems more like Wall Street than Las Vegas. His resume lists a dozen years in the financial business, including a stint at the prestigious German bank Oppenheim Group. Delaney, who operates out of Dublin, says he's an associate with the Society of Investment Analysts in Ireland.

Back to the top