Keeping Faith Is Futile With Lots of Stocks.

What's the next chapter for the "religion stocks" of 1999? That coinage comes from Steve Leuthold of the Leuthold Group in Minneapolis.

A religion stock inspires (or used to inspire) blind faith. You know the names: America Online, Charles Schwab Co., Cisco Systems, Dell Computer, EMC Corp., Lucent Technologies, Medtronic, Microsoft, Oracle and Yahoo, among others.

Last year, they sold at price/earnings ratios of around 60 or higher, meaning that investors foresaw magnificent earnings gains for years to come. Today, some are down only modestly. Others are off by 50 percent or more.

Believers assume that these stocks will bounce back, stronger than ever. And some of them will -- we just don't know which ones.

But if history is any guide, the religion stocks, on average, won't do as well as the market over the next 20 years.

Here, I'm harking back to the so-called Nifty Fifty stocks of the early l970s. You supposedly bought them at any price and held forever. Worshipers thought they could weather market downturns with ease.

But in the vicious bear market of 1973-74, the highest-flying half of the Nifty Fifty lost 57 percent of its value, and investors fled.

No one knows if the recent, wild market marks the end of the millennial mania for growth investing. But here's Lesson One for the week:

You can own the stock of a great company, but still pay too much for it.

Lesson Two bubbles up from the market's lower end. Some stocks will never come back.