The aughts were for naught.

After starting out the decade with so much promise, the Dow Jones industrial average - up more than 300 percent in the Nineties - ended the 10-year period with a whimper, finishing off 9.3 percent and forcing investors and homeowners alike to question most every asset class held in their portfolio.

That 17.6 percent average annual increase in the Nineties - the second best decade ever for stocks - drew tens of million of new investors into equities, and boy, did it hurt. Depressed home values and 401(k) accounts will force millions of workers to postpone their retirement - and the American Dreams of many have been burst.

For US stocks and investors, "the last 10 years have been a nightmare, really poor," Michele Gambera, chief economist at Ibbotson Associates, told one reporter.

Donald Marron, a former member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said in a published report that if you "want to play the blame game, the first group to blame are the irrationally exuberant investors back in 1999, who pushed valuations to levels that set us up for a tough decade."

"We fundamentally over-allocated resources to housing and the financial sector," Professor Marron says. "We simply had too many mortgage bankers and re-packagers running around and too many people building houses."

Instead of rushing into real estate and equities, investors would have been much better off almost anywhere else. Bonds outperformed stocks, as did most commodities. Oil, for example, increased 187 percent over the decade while gold soared 280 percent.

The Dow started the decade at 11,497.12 but staggered through the first three years, laid low first by the 9/11 terror attacks and then by the bursting of the dot-com bubble. By 2003, the housing bubble was picking up steam and housing prices pushed the market ahead.

By early 2006, the Dow had passed 11,000 for the first time in the decade. Later that same year, the 12,000-mark was surpassed. Despite fears that "irrational exuberance" was behind the markets' rise, low interest rates at the Federal Reserve kept the mortgage business humming, On Oct. 9, 2007, the Dow closed at 14,164.53. That would prove to be its all-time high as schisms and then full fractures of the mortgage market brought the marts to its knees.

By December, the Great Recession had begun.

The Wall Street meltdown would spell the end to Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and force Merrill Lynch, Washington Mutual, Wachovia, Countrywide Financial and many other financial firms into forced marriages.

Other financial firms that started the decade as powerhouses - like AIG, Fannie Mae and GM - are now wards of Washington. The Dow hit its decade low on March 2, closing at 6,547.05.

Not all companies limped through the decade.

Tech companies, which suffered through the dot-com collapse from 2000 through 2002, performed exceptionally.

In fact, in many ways it was the decade of personal tech.

Few companies had more of an impact - and rang up greater gains - than Apple. If the Nineties were the decade for Microsoft, then the naughts were all about Steve Jobs and Apple. The company rolled out one major innovation after another - the iPod, iTunes and the iPhone, to name just three.

The products helped Apple shares to explode, increasing 686 percent in the decade.

Another game-changer was the BlackBerry, made by Research in Motion, whose stock increased a staggering 778 percent since 1999.

By comparison, Microsoft labored through much of the decade, losing much of its buzz and 41.7 percent of its stock price.

And while those who bought real estate in the last two or three years got burned by the mortgage meltdown - as did those who bought homes they couldn't afford with exotic adjustable-rate mortgages - those who got in early in the decade made out quite well.

In fact, certain Manhattan properties doubled and tripled in value over the 10 years, according to The Corcoran Group.

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