The best bet for the long term is to buy shares and hold on to them. That was the lesson hammered into the heads of investors in the 1990s when the "cult of the equity" was at its peak. Unfortunately, they absorbed the message at precisely the wrong time.rnThe past decade has been disastrous for equities. Over the ten years to June 18th 2010 investors in developed-market equities earned a cumulative total return of minus 7.9%. By contrast medium-dated Treasury bonds returned 95.3% and high-yield American bonds 102.2%. Richard Cookson, the chief investment officer at Citi Private Bank (and a former journalist at The Economist), points out that the cumulative outperformance of high-yield bonds over equities dates back to 1995.
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