To be fair, major personal finance magazines weren't the only ones to make some flubbed calls for 2000. Just over 12 months ago, The Cincinnati Enquirer also polled prominent local investment professionals on their winning picks for the year.

        The group offered a basket of 22 stocks from high technology, such as Lucent, to old economy boring, such as Cintas or Ashland. The picks' annual returns also ran the gamut, from WorldCom losing 68 percent, to Medtronic gaining 66 percent.

        But overall, the portfolio bombed. The stocks averaged a return of -17.6 percent. Investing in 100 shares in each of the 22 companies would have produced a $30,725 loss.

        Still, you would have done better than throwing a dart at the stock pages. Borrowing the idea and the actual dart from John Johnston (the Tempo reporter who picks subjects for the Friday “dart” stories that way), reporter Amy Higgins blind-folded herself and threw at stock pages posted on a conference room wall.

        No one was hurt, but the 10 stocks closest to where the dart struck would have done worse in 2000 than almost all of the magazines and analysts. The 10 stocks — which included local Columbia Financial and Mexico's Grupo Casa Saba — averaged a return of -16.5 percent. Spending $12,975 to buy 100 shares of each would have produced a loss of more than $2,100.

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