'Tis the season to give thanks, mostly that the annus horribilis known as 2008 is blessedly near an end. The economy stalled, joblessness soared, home prices plunged and the market hacked up 40% of its value, not to mention more than a decade's worth of life savings.

Unless you were uncommonly smart, unusually lucky or an unconscionable fraud, the standard array of financial products left nothing but a lump of coal in your stocking. (That's a lousier present than ever, by the way, what with the price of coal having crumbled about 75% in the last six months.)

And yet in a year when pretty much the only winning strategy was to go short, stick to cash or sock everything away in Treasurys, some lousy investments managed to stand out even by today's dismal standards. Whether by dint of being bad bets or just bad ideas, here's a look back at some of 2008's worst stocking suckers, er, stuffers. Let's hope investors find better gifts hanging above the fireplace in 2009.

Commodity ETFs

Commodity ETFs taught investors some painful lessons this year, namely the dangers of narrow sector bets and the futility of chasing returns. The deepening global recession has knocked coal, oil and just about everything else that comes from the bowels of planet earth far off their midsummer pedestals.

Oil was near $150 a barrel back in July. Now it's lucky to hit $40. Talk about a short-lived bubble. Investors fleeing stocks looking to get well in the commodity space only compounded their losses. Market Vectors Coal ETF (KOL) lost two-thirds of its value year-to-date. U.S. Oil (USO) is down 60%. Returns like those make an ugly S&P 500 index fund look downright presentable.

Triple-Levered ETFs

ETFs that employ leverage to offer twice the long or short return of an underlying index make a lot of sense -- if you work at a hedge fund. The problem is these things are available to anyone with an online brokerage account. That's why we were somewhat concerned when Direxion Funds launched the world's first triple-levered ETFs, offering three times the long or short return of an underlying index.

Direxion made it clear that these products aren't aimed at individual investors, but we can't imagine that's kept some punters from plowing in, trying to recoup steep losses in go-for-broke bets. Leverage works wonders when you're swimming with the tide, but take the other side of that trade and you'll find yourself sucked down by an undertow from which it may be impossible to resurface.

Fund of Funds

A few weeks ago most folks had never heard of Bernard Madoff, he of the alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme. Now, thanks in part to so-called fund of funds, thousands of individuals, institutions and charities have become unwitting marks in a con game.

Fund of funds invest in other funds. Think of it as professional management upon professional management. But in addition to charging fees on top of those taken by the funds in which they invest -- and hedge funds, which are big fund of funds beneficiaries, charge enormous fees -- fund of funds are supposed to do sophisticated due diligence and risk management assessments of potential investments.

Tell that to investors in Fairfield Greenwich Group. This hedge fund and fund of funds entrusted $7.5 billion to Madoff. And lost it. Fund of funds that collect millions in fees only to lose billions more, even if they're on the up-and-up, are something we could all do without in 2009.

Auction-Rate Securities

It wasn't apparent back in early 2008, but auction-rate securities turned out to be the canary in the credit-crunch coal mine, the collapse of which still hasn't been sorted out.

Nearly all the big Wall Street firms hocked ARS as super-solid, slightly higher-yielding alternatives to money market funds. When the market for these things froze up in February, investors found themselves with $300 billion in holdings they couldn't sell. Since the golden rule of capitalism is that something is worth only what you can get someone else to pay for it, well, these things were essentially worth nothing.

Investors are gradually being made whole, but only because New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and other regulators have put a gun to the big firms' heads. We all know that there's no substitute for cash and that there are perils in chasing yield, but the ARS debacle was a nauseating way to re-learn both those lessons.

Private Equity Goes Public

Our late lamented bull market that blew up so spectacularly in the past year had a number of different players vying for the title of "Supreme Master of the Universe." Cheap credit and cash-rich corporate balance sheets made private equity-led leveraged and management buyouts the early contenders for that dubious distinction.

Not long ago private equity firms made the rest of us feel like suckers for not being able to get in on the riches to be had. Naturally that caused great excitement when private-equity macher Blackstone Group (BX) went public back in June. Soon other PE shops were set to follow, and it looked as if all us regular shmoes could finally get our grubby paws on some of that money the smartest guys on the Street were minting.

Cut to today: Blackstone has sunk more than 80% since its IPO. And those other PE firms? They've shelved their shelf statements, citing "market conditions." It was hard to fathom at the time, but private equity's stillborn arrival to the public markets was a blessing in disguise. Let's hope for more such "blessings" in the new year.