LI stock index on a roll in 2010

A look at the shares of Long Island's publicly traded companies as the year draws to a close shows a timeless truth: There's no real accounting for stock markets. Despite an economy - both nationally and locally - that refuses to heat up, stocks of Long Island companies were on a roll in 2010.

The markets show once again there is little connection between stock prices and the economy.

Since the beginning of the year, the Newsday Long Island Bloomberg Index, which was created in 1996 with a base value of 100, has risen 14.8 percent, to 167.10. The Index rose to as high as 190 in 2009 after dropping precipitously to about 130 in 2008, the year the Great Recession began on Long Island.

This year, the index was led by Getty Realty Corp. of Jericho, which leases properties in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic states; Park Electrochemical Corp., an aerospace and electronic composite materials maker in Melville; and Vicon Industries, a designer and producer of video security and surveillance systems in Hauppauge. In a recent report to investors, a JPMorgan analyst raised per-share earnings estimates on Getty, saying the company's expenses are expected to be lower.

Big losers were Jennifer Convertibles, Global Payment and ATC Healthcare.

On a stock-by-stock basis, the market is not often easy to understand. After all, who would expect Getty, basically a real estate company, to be up in this economy, and Veeco, a company attached to the highly popular solar world, to be down? But that's the market for you.

The national indexes are all way up. The Dow Jones industrial average is up 10 percent this year, the broader Standard & Poor's 500 index 12 percent and the tech-heavy Nasdaq exchange a stunning 17 percent.

This, locally and nationally, comes after huge stock losses in 2008. But Pearl Kamer, chief economist for the Long Island Association, said that by and large, companies are sitting on piles of cash. It's not so much that consumers are demanding their products or services, she said, as the fact that they have whittled down their payrolls through layoffs and attrition.

Profits have thus been restored since 2008. The problems are by no means over for the economy, Kamer added, noting the Island's still high 7.2 percent unemployment rate and the debt crisis that hangs over Nassau County. But, she said, markets have their own way of looking at the world.

"You can't really relate the performance of stocks to the performance of the economy," Kamer said. "They don't necessarily work in tandem."