hen it comes to consistently beating the S&P 500, the successor to Legg Mason's legendary Bill Miller is likely to have a foreign accent -- or at least an investment focus outside the U.S. As the door mercifully closed on 2008, TheStreet.com Ratings parsed its database of stock mutual funds for any that have outperformed the S&P 500 total-return index during each of the past 10 calendar years. Only a quartet of internationally focused funds, listed in the accompanying table, passed the test.

Using various individual retail sales figures in December and January may be one of the best indicators available for how to predict the next five to nine months of retail economic activity. Read on to discover how retail groupings can be used as a market indicator.

Linux and open source software are a key component in the underlying infrastructure of the finance industry, but the higher layers of the stack are still dominated by a multitude of proprietary, in-house solutions. A software startup called Marketcetera aims to change that with a new, open source platform for building automated trading systems.

Although it’s becoming more of a distant memory, I still remember those halcyon days when during the dot-com boom, I would receive the latest stock market tips from the plumber who was helping us unclog our kitchen sink. No joke. He said he was making a killing with his Cisco stock. Well these days, the plumber has made an about face and no longer thinks he can retire early. And it’s a similar story with many others I’ve spoken with. Nobody’s buying the once beloved Cisco stock anymore, or much anything else, for that matter.

You can never really understand investing until you weather a market downturn. The valuable lessons learned can help you through the bad times and can be applied to your portfolio when the economy recovers. Listed below are some common investor experiences during tough economic times and the lessons each investor can come away with after surviving the events.

Below is a listing of the 50 Worst Months in the S&P history along with the 1 month, 6 month, 1 year, and 5 year returns that followed: