What was hot and what was not in 2009

It's always nice when the last day of the year is on or near the weekend because it's much easier to make year-over-year comparisons without having to subtract out the daily price moves from the prior week that occurred in the new year.

Such is the case with the current edition of the Wall Street Journal's What's Hot -and Not that, in the right-most column below, shows just what kind of a year it was in 2009.
A look back to last year at this time shows a very different picture as captured here and reproduced below - look at all those big negative numbers on the right.

In a reminder of how wacky oil markets were a year ago, that 22.9 percent weekly gain atop the table below must have been one of those weird contango events on an expiring oil futures contract where the price would plunge about $10 during the last few days of trading.
In 2008, the dollar and gold were the only two items in the list that gained (though Treasuries had a good year in '08 and, for completeness, should have been included) while the first table above shows that the U.S. dollar was the only item in the list that declined in 2009.

Who knows what's in store for 2010 - maybe a year when nothing moves very far at all would be a nice change of pace after a tumultuous last few years of the "Awful Aughts".