Gallup asked folks if they were satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things were going in the U.S. at the time.

The latest reading shows that only 24 percent of Americans are satisfied with the way things are going in the U.S. at this time. That may be the case, but don't make the mistake of making your investing decisions based upon this information.

Satisfaction peaks (1987, 1990 and late 1990s) and troughs (late 1970s, early 1990s and early 2009) provide a near-perfect contrary indicator for the stock market investor! You would have done well to sell at peak levels of satisfaction and to invest more during low levels of satisfaction.

Extreme lows in confidence coincided with major stock market bottoms, and extreme highs in satisfaction coincided with significant peaks. The recent low of 7 percent in early 2009 was the lowest on record going back through the past three decades of this survey. The recent and still low 24 percent reading would suggest that despite the powerful rally stocks have enjoyed over the past year that in a relative sense, we're still much closer to a major bottom than we are to a major top.

Q: Which are better stocks, growth or value?

A: My regular readers know that I prefer value-oriented investment funds. That's not to say that I advocate only holding value funds. Diversification is important, and many of the best actively managed funds and index funds own growth as well as value stocks.

Dan Wiener completed some interesting analysis, which examined the performance of growth versus value stocks over the past 30 years.

He analyzed two major U.S. stock indexes: the Russell 1000, which is comprised of larger and mid-size company stocks; and the Russell 2000, which is a smaller-company stock index. For each index, his graph (which can be seen on www.erictyson.com) shows the relative performance of growth versus value stocks within the index. When the line is rising, that indicates that growth stocks are outperforming value. When the line is falling, then value stocks are outperforming growth stocks.

Growth did comparatively better between 1978 to 1980, 1988 to 1991 and 1998 to 1999. However, over the long term, value has clearly won, especially among small-company stocks. The past decade has been comparatively stronger for value stocks, although growth has picked up a bit in recent years.

One other lesson is clear from examining this graph: Beware buying into growth after it is has one of its short-term periods of outperformance.