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Bob Turner, chief investment officer of Turner Investment Partners, is willing to bet that times have been hard enough for long enough to make it worthwhile to return to stocks. He thinks the market has already hit bottom and that, if the historical pattern holds, it will bounce about 40 percent from the low.

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Fourth Quarter

HE recommends “high-quality growth companies at bargain-basement prices,” like the tech blue chips Apple, Qualcomm and Google. He also likes several industries — retailing, homebuilding, financial services and semiconductor manufacturing — that are highly sensitive to economic conditions and are thus potentially big beneficiaries of a recovery.

Robert Arnott, chairman of the asset management firm Research Affiliates, is far less confident about the stock market’s prospects. He warns of a further decline and sees a better buying opportunity in 6 to 12 months.

While he is avoiding stocks, he finds investment-grade corporate bonds a worthwhile middle ground for investors looking to assume a bit of risk. With recent yields roughly six percentage points above those of Treasury bonds, he wondered, “How on earth could they have defaults large enough to make that 6 percent spread reasonable?”

For his part, Mr. Swanson at MFS suggests taking the long view. With the outlook for the economy and corporate earnings so iffy, he says that he doesn’t know if stocks are a short-term bargain, but that they look cheap to him for anyone who can hold on for, say, a decade. He called stocks and high-quality corporate bonds “two glaring opportunities to ride out the storm.”

The short-term outlook for some investors is so up in the air in this perilous economy that they don’t have the luxury of considering the long term, Mr. Golub said.

“If you have a cyclical job, you don’t have the ability to take on a lot of stock market and economic risk, and you should be much more conservative,” he advised.

Patient investors with more secure circumstances and an appetite for risk, meanwhile, stand a good chance of getting fat again after such a lean year.

“If you’re a tenured professor, a physician at a hospital or a fireman, you should be looking at these opportunities in the market and think: ‘This is fantastic, I can buy cheap inventory. Time is on my side.’ ” Mr. Golub said. “Your goal should be taking the most risk you can as long as you can survive the worst possible outcome.”