You'd be wrong - at least, if you expected the constant huffing and puffing to take a typical mutual fund very far.

Through the end of last week, the average among all 8,000-plus U.S. stock and bond funds tracked by Bloomberg showed a mere 0.7 percent gain since Jan. 1. Stock funds edged up 1.4 percent. Bond funds were about unchanged.

Now, nobody who was paying the slightest attention thinks stock funds spent the first half sitting around doing nothing. They started off on a hesitant note, rallied briskly, took an abrupt plunge and then in late June began what looked like an attempt to rally again.

Check out the action in the Ishares MSCI Emerging Markets Index Fund, an exchange-traded fund specializing in stocks from emerging economies such as South Korea, Brazil and Mexico.

As of early May, it sported an impressive 26 percent return since New Year's. A few weeks later, it had given back every penny of that gain.

So given that many funds made little or no progress, there's a temptation to conclude that nothing of much significance was accomplished. That isn't necessarily so.

Consider, instead, that a speculative fever erupted and then broke, all in a few months' time. Just possibly, that helped to set the stage for the next meaningful advance by stocks in general, and some especially hot stock groups in particular.

Among those categories, I have in mind emerging markets stocks (disclosure note: I own shares of an emerging markets exchange-traded fund which I rode up, and down, with everybody else these past several months).

Through the first four months of the year, according to the consulting firm Financial Research Corp. in Boston, investors bought a net $9 billion of shares in diversified emerging markets funds. That total was enough to rank emerging markets stock funds as the sixth-best-selling fund group for early 2006.

By far the biggest seller, with more than $22 billion in inflows, was ''foreign large blend,'' funds that combine both growth and value styles while concentrating on big stocks based outside the U.S.

And how have foreign large blend funds performed with all that money coming in? According to Chicago-based researcher Morningstar Inc., foreign large blend funds averaged a 4 percent year-to-date gain with a week to go in the first half.

Not much instant gratification there. If patience is the great virtue in long-term investing, millions of us got a chance to exercise it in the first half of 2006.

---

Chet Currier is a Bloomberg News columnist. He can be reached at ccurrier@Bloomberg.net.