BEST Stock Investment: Should You Quit Buying Stocks?

More than 2 million people saw Jon Stewart clobber CNBC's Jim Cramer during his now-famous appearance on The Daily Show.

Stewart the comedian became Stewart the commentator -- and he sounded a lot like former presidential candidate John Edwards, who talked about "two Americas," one for the rich and one for the poor. Stewart said:

One [market] has been sold to us as long-term. Put your money in 401(k)s. Put your money in pensions and just leave it there. Don't worry about it. It's all doing fine. Then, there's this other market -- this real market that is occurring in the back room, where giant piles of money are going in and out and people are trading them, and it's transactional and it's fast. But it's dangerous, it's ethically dubious, and it hurts that long-term market.

Stewart and his righteous outrage were speaking for a lot of people that night. Most of us lost money in the market recently, and nearly every day brings new tales of outright deception, monetary malfeasance, and just plain unethical behavior.

It's enough to make you wonder whether you should just get out.

How about an Ethics 101 course?
Cramer is better than most. At least the guy admits he's bent (but not broken, he says) the rules for personal gain. Many of the Wall Street players at the heart of this mess still want to claim a measure of innocence.

Ethics have never seemed to matter on the Street; apparently, they still don't. How else do you explain Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) deciding it's OK to calendar-shift December into 2009 when reporting results recently? Sure, it's legal, but it feels like a shell game.

Stupid really is as stupid does
Mind-numbing stupidity really does appear to be the coin of the realm when it comes to banking, brokering, and regulating. Consider the FDIC. Created to protect depositors after earlier meltdowns, we're now learning that the agency failed to collect premiums from Bank of America (NYSE: BAC) and its peers for a decade.

So Stewart is right to at least question the fairness of the financial system as we know it. But is there really one stock market for those "in the know," and another for the suckers who aren't?

Ignorance is, in fact, bliss
Only the insiders can say for sure, but history paints a reassuring picture for those of us not "in the know" -- at least if you're committed to long-term investing:

Year	Index Return	Market Beaters*	Winners As a % of All Stocks
2008	(38.49%)	1,501	43.2%
2007	3.53%	1,223	36.2%
2006	13.62%	1,417	46.9%
2005	3.51%	1,340	47.2%
2004	9.13%	1,347	53.9%
2003	26.10%	1,107	57.7%
2002	(23.75%)	1,225	61.5%
2001	(12.36%)	1,175	64.1%

Source: Capital IQ, a division of Standard & Poor's.
*Includes only those stock trading on major U.S. exchanges that began the year worth at least $250 million in market cap.

Notice the pattern. In most years, those who held individual stocks saw an average of 40% of their picks beat the market. In two of the three worst years, six out of 10 were market-beaters.

Sometimes, the gains were huge. Ceradyne (Nasdaq: CRDN) doubled in 2004. Guess? (NYSE: GES) nearly tripled in 2005. And in 2007, Mosaic (NYSE: MOS) quadrupled. You didn't need to be an insider to get those gains. You only needed to examine the fundamentals and be brave enough to buy, and then hold.

There are risks to buying and holding, of course. Consider tax titan H&R Block (NYSE: HRB). Had you bought at the dawn of 2001 and held till today, you'd be up more than 80%. But you'd have more than doubled your money had you sold at the end of the year.

Either way, though, you'd have won. The market has lost more than 23% of its value over the past eight years.

Kick the market when it's down
The lesson? The way to beat a broken market -- the sort that Stewart so viscerally fears -- is still to bet on the best businesses over the very long term, businesses that resemble the best stock idea I've ever seen. These companies:

• Produce abundant free cash flow.
• Sustain high rates of revenue growth.
• Demonstrate sustainable advantages by way of expanding gross margin.

Marvel Entertainment (NYSE: MVL) is a good example. Combined, his picks and those of his brother Tom are up more than 39% on the market as of this writing.