There was no escaping the stock market's collapse for the Buffalo Niagara region's publicly traded companies.

In fact, Wall Street's meltdown hit the local stocks especially hard during the fourth quarter, after the local shares had held up decently as the stock market struggled through the late spring and summer.

A portfolio that owned a single share of each of the stocks of companies based in the Buffalo Niagara region last year would have lost 31.1 percent, including a gut-wrenching 27.4 percent plunge during the year's final three months.

It was the worst year for the Buffalo Portfolio in more than two decades, when the biggest single-year decline had been a 20.4 percent drop in 1990.

The decline was so sweeping that just three local stocks -- First Niagara Financial Group, Greatbatch Inc. and Ecology & Environment - - finished the year with stock prices higher than where they started 2008. More than two-thirds of the local stocks dropped by more than 20 percent. Half plunged by a third or more.

"It's certainly been a whirlwind year," says Thomas Quealy, the president of Nottingham Advisors, an Amherst money management firm. "It's almost like there were two separate years: Whatever happened through August and then everything from September on."

After a brutal year like that, it's small solace to investors that the local stocks still managed to beat all of the major market indexes for the second straight year and the sixth time in the last nine years.

The local stocks' painful losses hurt just a little less than the 33.8 percent plunge by the Dow Jones industrial average; the 38.5 percent fall by the Standard & Poor's 500 index and the 40.5 percent drip by the Nasdaq Composite index.

The local stocks, which are dominated by small, value-oriented company stocks, even took slightly less of a beating than their most closely matched major index, the Russell 2000 index of small company shares, which dropped by 34.8 percent last year.

"This thing pretty much took the stock market as a hostage," says Anthony J. Ogorek, who runs Ogorek Wealth Management, an Amherst investment advisory firm.

Investors were badly battered during the year. Their home equity evaporated, in many housing markets; their brokerage and retirement accounts shriveled; and once-plentiful credit was far harder to obtain.

"It was a true panic, where people only wanted to own Treasurys," Ogorek said.

It was a sweeping downturn that touched every corner of the stock market, rendering risk-reduction strategies such as asset allocation and diversification ineffective in stemming the decline.