Better dull than dismal.

THE collective sigh of relief you're hearing these days comes from those millions of American stockholders who are at last able to open their broker statements each month without thoughts of kicking in their wide-screen TVs or gunning their SUVs into the Pacific.

The bear market is dead. Last year the long-beleaguered Nasdaq jumped 50 percent, and at one point last week the Dow had reached the 10,700 level before slipping back on worrisome news about a possible interest rate hike down the road. Whatever the day-to-day gyrations, this is a presidential election year and the smart money is still on a solid, steady 2004--light years from 24 or 36 months ago when there seemed no end to the bad news.

So why are so many investors still hiding behind rocks? Why aren't you seeing more analysts grandstanding on CNBC or more book peddlers predicting a 100,000 Dow within two years?

Why has Wall Street's turnaround gotten such scant attention?

You know why. Because we all got burned so fast and so furiously that recuperation is more appropriate than celebration. Because the value of our portfolios is well below where they were in March 2000 (not counting the lost investment returns over the past four years). Because many of us steadfastly held onto telecom and tech stocks rather than dump them at a huge loss--and that while those issues are edging upward, they're still worlds away from their former glories.

And since so much of investing is a head game, I might as well suggest another explanation for the current stupor: Wall Street just isn't much fun.

The Martha Stewart trial is a sad spectacle on so many fronts, but mostly because it reprises a sordid time when lots of otherwise smart, sensible people did lots of dumb things and in the process corrupted themselves in the name of a few more bucks. I'm not just talking about the folks in handcuffs. I'm talking about you and me.

Yes, it's true we were only following the advice of experts by holding onto stocks that were trading at nonsensical levels--and that some of those experts were later discovered to be crooks. But by 1999 and early 2000, there were plenty of warning signs. Even after the Nasdaq began falling that year, you could have gotten out relatively unscathed. Instead, most of us became convinced that bailing out on dips was a sucker's bet and that somehow, someway, the numbers would turn around. And then we watched our money burn.

So now it's a bull world once again, except it just doesn't feel the same. For one thing, there's really no one to trust anymore--not CEOs nor stock analysts nor those screamers on cable TV. The eminence of Wall Street schmoozing, Louis Rukeyser, kept assuring us during the downdraft that things weren't as bad as they seemed. So how can you possibly watch him these days and take him seriously?

And even should our trust be regained, there's no telling whether it will reap any rewards. This is a far more complicated world than in the late 1990s (the most robust economic time we might see in our lifetimes), and companies are mired in a kind of post-scandal tentativeness, where pressures from shareholders, regulators, customers and competitors make them look a bit uninspired and dull.

Dull is no way to make big money, to be sure. And yet, as you ready to open January's broker statements, maybe it's not the worst place to be either.

Mark Lacter is editor of the Business Journal.