Desert Island Index: Picking a Favorite in Trying Times

With a war on, the economic picture is harder to read than it has been in years. To cut through some of the fog, we asked a handful of professional investors to take a theoretical gamble on one of five major indices over the next six months and 10 years.

The unscientific survey found strategists roundly opposed to gambling on the speculative names of the recent past: nobody picked the big-cap tech Nasdaq 100 or the Wilshire 5000 for either time frame. Three of the six strategists interviewed thought the S&P 500 was the best bet over a six-month period, while the small-cap Russell 2000 received three votes for the 10-year horizon. One strategist chose the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average for both the short and the long term.

Relative to the other indices, pros liked the S&P 500 over six months for a combination of reasons: greater diversification than the Dow and Nasdaq, fatter capitalization than the Russell and Wilshire, cheaper valuations than the Nasdaq, and relative earnings strength compared with the Russell 2000. ...