Very little has happened in the first half of 2001 to put the fun back into mutual funds.

Stock funds, both domestic and international, followed a dreary 2000 with another six months of struggle.

Interest rate reductions by the Federal Reserve, if intended to perk up the stock market, had hardly any of that effect. Instead they served mainly to depress yields on money-market funds and to stir up inflation concerns that threatened to blunt a nice little comeback by bond funds.

At mid-June the average of more than 7,700 stock funds tracked by Bloomberg showed an 8.4 percent decline since the start of the year. That left them sitting with a 13.8 percent loss over the last 12 months.

The average yield on money funds, which exceeded an annualized 6 percent last fall, slumped to 3.7 percent at last word from iMoneyNet Inc. The lone bright spot among the principal categories, or “asset classes” as the in-crowd likes to call them, was a 2.7 percent year-to-date gain for the Bloomberg average of bond funds.

All in all, enough to send a mutual-fund hobbyist back to his stamp collection. Fantasy baseball leagues thrived on the extra time people didn’t spend checking their discount brokerage accounts.

But take heart. As a trip to a confab for the press in mid-June reminded me, over the long haul this is supposed to prove a healthy development, restoring some old-fashioned verities.

“Successful investing is not entertainment,” Stanley O’Neal, who heads the force of 16,000 brokers at Merrill Lynch & Co., told several dozen of us newshounds assembled in a midtown club so snooty everybody had to swear not to mention it by name. “It’s not recreation,” O’Neal added. “It’s hard work,”

Lawrence Lasser, chief executive of the Boston-based fund giant Putnam Investments, with $345 billion in assets, likewise spoke of a return to realism. “Year after year, markets seemed to grow to the sky,” he told the gathering, put on by the Forum for Investor Advice, a trade group

of firms that

market funds through brokers.

“If investing success looked easy, in a way it was,” Lasser said. “Until it ended, and all of a sudden it wasn’t easy any more.”

I left the meeting properly sobered, but the solemn mood didn’t stick with me long.

Resist gloom

Back on the city’s steaming sidewalks, a rebellious impulse arose. “Who cares what they say?” I mumbled behind clenched teeth, careful not to appear to my fellow New Yorkers as though talking to myself. “If people want to get some kicks out of managing their money, I say let them!”

That left one question unanswered: In these punky times for the mamrkets, how’s anybody going to do that? The only way, I considered, would be to drop our demands for immediate gratification.

Keep telling yourself, I told myself, that fallow times like this are great for long-term investors. Every month that stocks remain depressed, your contribution to the company’s 401(k) plan buys fund shares at lower prices than you’d pay if the market were booming.

As long as you don’t need to cash out in the near future, it’s better that the bulls stay penned up. They’ll bust out again some day they always do. And the more time you’ve had to build up your account the better ride you’ll get when that happens.

As Lasser noted at the symposium, “quick and easy” isn’t how it works in other important aspects of life, like education. So why should anybody expect it in saving and investing? “The critical component is not speed,” he said.

When you think about it, the quality investors need here is hurry-up’s direct opposite, patience. Apply a measure of that, and steadily accumulating fund shares in a dull market might even begin to seem like fun.

Chet Currier is a columnist for Bloomberg News.