Consumer staples have been struggling recently, but Validea CEO John Reese says that’s no reason for long term investors to avoid them.

“In his most recent edition of What Works on Wall Street, quantitative investing guru James O’Shaughnessy examined decades worth of historical data and found that, over the long term, the best performing sector of the market has been consumer staples,” writes Reese. “From 1968 through 2009, O’Shaughnessy found that staples stocks averaged compound annual returns of 13.6%, beating the next-best sector (financials) by 1.2 percentage points per year. And, staples had the second-lowest standard deviation out of the market’s 10 sectors.”

Reese talks about why staples have such a strong track record, and says his Guru Strategies are finding a number of attractive staples stocks. He examines a handful, including Budweiser parent Anheuser-Busch InBev.