Barry Ritholtz of FusionIQ and The Big Picture blog recently offered his “10 Trends to Watch in Finance for 2013”, and among them is “The death of buy-and-hold has been greatly exaggerated.”

“Investors have a tendency to take the wrong lesson from recent experiences, and this one is no different,” Ritholtz writes in his Washington Post column. “Buy-and-hold investors don’t have a lot to show since the market peak — 2000 or 2007 — but that is more about valuation than anything else. Since the punditocracy declared the end of buy-and-hold investing, something interesting has happened: Ten-year buy-and-hold returns became half-decent. Time has moved today’s 10-year-return start date near the post-2003 dot-com bust lows (March 2003). And three-year returns have outperformed both tactical portfolios and global macro as an investment style.”

Ritholtz says the lesson is “not that buy-and-hold is dead. Rather, it’s that when you begin investing and the valuation you pay matter a great deal to your returns.”

Ritholtz’s other trends to watch include “Demographics are a huge driver” of the economy and markets, and “The Fed still holds the system together”. In fact, he says that “without [the Federal Reserve’s] extraordinary intervention, the United States would probably be in a deep recession, home foreclosures would be considerably higher and major money-center banks would either be begging for another bailout or declaring bankruptcy.”