15 Great Stocks From the Great Depression

The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression has investors everywhere wondering whether to buy, hold -- or bail. Though there's no telling whether the current global recession will turn into a sepia-toned, soup-lined sequel to that historic calamity, it did get us thinking: If the whole point of stocks is to buy low and sell high, then the Great Depression must have offered some pretty good buying opportunities.

But what were they? SmartMoney.com went in search of the Great Depression’s best buys, with help from the Center for Research in Security Prices at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. The CRSP crunched numbers to find the 50 best performing stocks from 1932 to 1954 by cumulative total return. The result: A dream portfolio for the greatest investors of the Greatest Generation.

We started with 1932 because, while the famous market crash occurred in 1929, it didn't hit rock bottom until almost three years later. Even uglier, the Dow Jones Industrial Average didn't regain its precrash level until 1954, meaning it took more than a couple of decades to make investors whole.

Looking over the list is a reminder of days gone by -- and a time when company names were straightforward and even mundane. No Navistars or Altiras here. Fans of "The Simpsons" might recall that Mr. Burns had put money into the fictional Amalgamated Spats, but in real life he should have doubled down on Electric Boat and National Acme Co. The former, which still makes submarines to this day as a unit of General Dynamics (GD), returned a whopping 55,000% over those 22 years. National Acme (it made machine tools, not giant slingshots for perpetually frustrated cartoon coyotes) returned more than 10,000%.

We've taken the complete list of 50 top investments and selected 15 of the most telling. One thing many of them share -- and a factor that might resonate with investors today, given the Obama administration’s stimulus plans -- is the impact of massive deficit spending. New Deal, World War II and Cold War outlays fueled many of these stocks. Here, then, is our look at some of the greatest Great Depression stocks.