Dogs of the Dow.

SOME of the world's best-known corporate names have become real losers. Kodak. General Motors. McDonald's. AT&T. IBM. What's more, the chances of these giants prospering as they once did look dim.

Investors who trusted those big names have suffered. AT&T shares have fallen 78 percent from their 1999 peak and Kodak stock has declined 75 percent from its 1998 high. IBM has done the best of the downtrodden five, having fallen 36 percent from its 1999 high.

Stocks generally were lousy investments during that period, certainly, but people might have expected the world's biggest photography company, the biggest automaker and the biggest restaurant chain to hold up better than EMC Corp., JDS Uniphase Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc.

Kodak Chief Executive Daniel Carp admitted in August that the company had to move faster into digital and accept a decline in consumer-film sales. After two reorganizations in two years and a steady reduction in its workforce, which continues, Kodak still has to prove it can modernize. Its sales have dropped steadily in the past three years as its profits have sunk 45 percent.

General Motors' $1.7 billion in profit in 2002 represented less than 1 percent of its $186.8 billion in sales. The company also has to run hard to keep up with its retirement obligations; its pension funds had a deficit of $25.4 billion at midyear. GM has been selling bonds and assets to beef up the accounts.

McDonald's earnings declined slightly in both the first and second quarters, following a loss in the fourth. Sales in stores open a year or more increased in the second quarter--ending several months of declines--helped by new offerings of salads. McDonald's shares have risen to $23.60 from $12.12 in March, but were still down 52 percent from their 1999 high.

AT&T and IBM might look even worse except for financial engineering. Last November, after selling its cable unit to Comcast Corp., AT&T did a reverse split of its shares, with stockholders getting one new one for five old ones. Without that, AT&T shares would have closed the other week at a paltry $4.48.

IBM, whose mainframes lost out to the miniaturization of computers, has boosted earnings per share by spending billions to buy back stock. IBM's shares outstanding declined 24 percent in the past 10 years.

The shares of all five of these companies are included in the bellwether Dow Jones Industrial Average. There's a time-honored investment strategy called Dogs of the Dow that says to buy the poorest recent performers of the 30 stocks in the group - and then watch them recover. It probably wouldn't be smart to make that bet with any of the above. Kodak is doing so poorly, analysts last week speculated it might be dropped from the Dow.