Jan. 13--The befuddled experts trapped in Wall Street's Cimmerian abyss are starting to see what they believe may be the light at the end of the tunnel. But skeptics aren't ruling out the possibility it's only their imagination. Or a train.

John Frankola, of Vista Investment Management, Downtown, cites a raft of historical statistics about how well stocks have done following big market downdrafts or coming out of recessions. One of his favorites was culled from Barron's: Since 1945, during the 11 quarters when the economy was the weakest, stocks generated average gains of 5.5 percent, more than twice their average quarterly gain.

"You could have a decent rally this quarter, especially if near the end of the quarter some parts of the economy have stabilized," Mr. Frankola says.

Just treading water would mollify many investors after a year when major market indexes tumbled more than 30 percent.

The market's worst year since 1931 left someone who invested in the S&P 500 index 10 years ago with average annual returns of negative 1.4 percent. Mr. Frankola said the only worse 10-year period ended in 1938, when S&P 500 investors lost an average of 1.7 percent annually.

Local stocks weren't exempt from the carnage: The Post-Gazette/Bloomberg index fell 42 percent. Only five stocks in the index registered gains. Four were regional banks.

Analysts say that's because many regional and community banks weren't slammed by the credit issues that battered their bigger brethren. Western Pennsylvania banks had the added advantage of serving a region that avoided the housing bubble.

"Banks which just have normal deposit business do well when short rates go down as much as they have," said Daniel S. Henderson, president of Cookson, Peirce & Co., Downtown.

Mr. Frankola said the smaller banks also got a lift because few large institutional investors own them, so they weren't subject to the forced selling that hammered stocks popular with hedge funds.

One stock that didn't escape the turmoil was PNC Financial Services Group [ticker: PNC], which became the nation's fifth-largest bank with its year-end acquisition of National City. PNC shares fell 14 percent following the announcement of the deal in October and were off 25 percent for the year.

That's better than a lot of the bank's peers. Mr. Henderson attributes that to sanctions federal regulators levied against PNC earlier this decade for questionable transactions involving AIG.

"It caused them ahead of the game to clean up their balance sheet," he said.