Concern that European leaders will fail to keep Greece from defaulting, the May 2010 flash crash in which $862 billion was erased from equities in less than 20 minutes, and some of the most volatile markets on record last year helped spur the withdrawals. Of the more than $11.1 trillion that was wiped off U.S. shares between 2007 and 2009, $8.1 trillion has been restored.

"The stock market has effectively doubled since the March '09 low, and we're still in redemption territory for equity funds," said Liz Ann Sonders, the New York-based chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab Corp. Her firm has $1.7 trillion in client assets. "That's never happened."

Money managers haven't kept up with the S&P 500's advance. Hedge funds declined 5 percent in 2011, the third year of losses since 1990, according to Chicago-based Hedge Fund Research Inc. A total of 21 percent of 525 global fund categories tracked by Morningstar Inc. topped their benchmark indexes last year, the fewest since at least 1999.

'Fear and Anxiety'

Valuations have fallen even as the S&P 500 rallied 21 percent since the end of 2009 because profits increased five times as fast. The price-earnings ratio for the benchmark gauge of American equities has fallen to 14 times reported income, down from 24 at the end of 2009. The ratio slipped as low as 10.2 at the end of the 17-month bear market in 2009, when the S&P 500 declined 57 percent.

"It was the severity and the quickness of the fall and how long it's taking to come out of the trough that's been adding fear and anxiety," said Warren Koontz, head of U.S. large-cap value stocks at Loomis Sayles & Co. in Boston, which manages about $160 billion. "Over time, if things continue to progress on a step-by-step basis, people will come back to stocks."

Trading at the New York Stock Exchange declined to the lowest level since 1999 last month, with the average volume over the 50 days ending Jan. 25 slowing to 838.4 million shares, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The value of stock changing hands dropped to $24.9 billion, a 50-day average not seen since at least 2005.

That's contributing to a contraction on Wall Street. The number of securities professionals registered with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority fell to 629,518 last year, the lowest end-of-year level since at least 2002.

Lost Decade

Rallies have faded since 2000, when the dot-com bubble drove the Dow Jones Industrial Average to a record high. The gauge peaked at 11,722.98 that year, and has risen above and then fallen below that level seven times since. It ended at 12,862.23 on Feb. 3, up 5.3 percent so far this year.

The past decade parallels the span between Dec. 31, 1964, and the end of 1981, when the Dow added less than 1 point after surging interest rates diminished the appeal of equities. While the 115-year-old stock gauge ended the period at 875, it ranged between 577.60 and 1,051.70.