As I discussed in Sunday’s column, the stock market has had a rough decade. A bit of Wall Street folklore known as the Santa Claus rally, though, is pointing to a better outcome in the last year of the ’00s.

The saying goes, “If Santa Claus should fail to call, bears may come to Broad and Wall.” And Santa came bearing plenty of gifts this year, according to the folklore followers at Stock Trader’s Almanac. They measure Santa’s largesse by how the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index performs on the last five trading days of December and the first two in January. With a 7.4 percent gain, this year’s Santa rally is the second-biggest ever, topped only by a 7.5 percent gain in 1932-33. In case your memory doesn’t go back that far, 1933 was a phenomenal year for the stock market, with the S&P 500 gaining 46.6 percent and the Dow Jones industrial average roaring ahead by 66.7 percent.

Still, St. Nick seems better at predicting bear markets.  Bad things certainly happened after the 1999-2000 and 2007-08 holidays passed without a rally. The Almanac warns us that several Santa rallies have been followed by down markets, “so caution is in order.”