While the official start to the next decade isn't until 1/1/2011, the media typically starts and ends its decade coverage when the "9" in the year rolls back to "0".  Over the next few weeks, investors will surely get their fair share of decade coverage, in both looks back at the 2000s and looks forward to the 2010s.

Since 1900, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has declined in price (not total returns) in just two decades -- the 1930s and the 2000s.  The Dow is currently down 9.2% since the end of 1999.  In the 1930s the index fell 39.5%.  The best decade was the 1990s when the index rose 317.6%.

Along with the looks back at the 2000s, we'll also see plenty of stories touting stocks for the next decade in the coming months.  Prognosticating just a year out is hard enough, much less a decade.  Just ask the folks that made their projections for this decade back in 2000. 

Below we highlight the stock picks for the next decade from two articles that came out in early 2000.  The first table below shows the performance of Fortune's "10 Stocks to Last the Decade" that came out in its August 2000 issue.  As shown, just one stock has gone up since then (also the only one to outperform the S&P 500), while two are out of business.

The second table shows the performance of stocks from a New York Times article on February 20, 2000 that asked 10 "top investors" for their top pick for 2010.  These stocks did a little better than Fortune's picks, but not by much.  An equalweighted portfolio of these stocks would actually be up about 30% because of two big winners, but the majority of the "top investors" that participated picked stocks that underperformed significantly.  Click here to read the article.

Investors can and do gain a lot of insight from outlook pieces, etc., but we feel that projecting out a decade is futile at best.  We promise we won't be making any 2020 stock picks here at Bespoke!

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