Unhappy over the end of a long winning streak with your mutual funds in the 2000 bear market? Despair not, you’re in distinguished company.

All kinds of multiyear records of success among stock funds have gone kablooey this year, or are in danger of suffering that fate in the few weeks that remain.

Take William H. Miller III’s heralded stretch of nine consecutive years in which his $11.8 billion Legg Mason Value Trust has outpaced the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index. This year the fund is down 8.8 percent, and unless it can make up a deficit of 1.8 percentage points by the close Dec. 31, that streak will be history.

Investors in funds based on the S & P; index, most notably the Vanguard 500 Index Fund, are facing a similar comedown. Bloomberg data show that the $104 billion fund, now off 7 percent, is headed for its first bottom-half annual performance among all funds since 1993.

The Vanguard 500 Index fund is hovering in the 31st percentile of all funds year-to-date, meaning it trailed the results of more than two-thirds the total fund population. That’s in stark contrast to 1995-99, when its percentile ranks were an amazing 96, 99, 98, 99 and 69 as the big growth stocks that dominate the index left the rest of the market in the dust.

This year that picture is flipped upside down. Among the index’s 50 largest components, for example, Qualcomm Inc. and America Online Inc. have each plunged more than 40 percent.

And before we forget, the S & P; 500 itself is ending a five-year run in which its returns exceeded 20 percent annually. It gained 38 percent in 1995, 23 percent in ’96, 33 percent in ’97, 29 percent in ’98 and 21 percent in ’99. The index last posted an annual loss in 1990, when its total return including dividends was minus 3 percent.

A tough year. But beyond the attention they attract as signposts of the times, none of these broken streaks is any great cause for anguish that I can see.

Miller at Legg Mason Value Trust averaged a 26 percent-a-year return from the end of 1990 to the end of 1999, walloping the S & P; 500 by almost 6 percentage points a year. That works out to a total return of 725 percent while the S & P; 500 was returning 440 percent.

If you classify Miller as a “value” investor, concentrating on out-of-favor stocks, note that his fund nearly doubled the 14 percent annual return from 1990 to 1999 of the Vanguard Value Index Fund.

So who’s to grouse about less than 2 percentage points of “underperformance,” in Wall Street parlance, this year? You might figure a fund that consistently beat the market in bull years would lag a bit when the market is down, especially given Miller’s sometimes liberal definition of “value” (AOL was the fund’s largest holding at last report, accounting for 6.7 percent of its assets as of Oct. 30. Other big losers among Miller’s Top Five were Gateway Inc. and Amazon.com Inc.).

Now, it’s true that Miller has some new shareholders these days who weren’t aboard in the ’90s. As it happens, I’m one of them, via a retirement account. Miller’s past accomplishments, no matter how impressive, do us little good.

But if I invested in Value Trust expecting Miller to beat the market every year forever, it’s probably just as well that I got disabused of that notion right away.

Says Christopher Traulsen, an analyst at Morningstar Inc., “A little perspective is in order. The fund’s loss this year pales in comparison to its prowess during the past decade. Miller has built that record by making moves that often were unpopular at the time.”

Unless I sell all my funds every Dec. 31 and buy a new batch, annual fund results are of limited concern to me anyway. “Winning streaks” count for nothing in comparison to the goals I hope to accomplish through long-term investing in a diversified portfolio of funds and other investments.

But just for the fun of it, check out the Fidelity Magellan Fund’s 2000 performance. Bob Stansky, who runs the biggest of all managed stock funds at $102 billion in assets, won raves from his rivals by beating the S & P; 500, despite the fund’s bulk, in 1998 and 1999. This year he’s in a neck-and-neck battle to do it again, leading the index by less than a percentage point with a loss of 6.4 percent approaching the finish line.

Hey, who says mutual funds are boring?

Chet Currier is a columnist for Bloomberg News.