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It has been a little less than a year since the great infrastructure boom was launched with President Barack Obama's $787-billion (U.S.) stimulus package, promising roads, bridges and jobs, jobs, jobs. It looked like an ideal time to make an infrastructure-themed investment, and the fact that the promised building boom coincided with the final year of touches on the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver was a bonus. How could investors go wrong?

Like many of these big-picture investment themes, the results have been mixed. Since Mr. Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in mid-February, 2009, North American stock market indexes have taken off. The S&P 500 index has risen a total of 40 per cent (after including dividends), as investors bet early that extraordinary measures taken to turn around the U.S. economy would work out. In Canada, the S&P/TSX composite index has risen about 41 per cent over the same period – driven in part by Canada's own stimulus spending.

By comparison, infrastructure stocks have merely kept up with this strong advance. We looked at five infrastructure stocks for companies based in the United States, Canada and Europe, and an exchange-traded fund that tracks the MFC Global Infrastructure Index. The results over the past 12 months suggest that betting big on infrastructure probably wasn't worth the effort.

The Claymore Global Infrastructure ETF has gained only 15 per cent over this period, severely lagging both benchmark indexes. Many of the companies within the ETF are pipelines and energy developers, which aren't necessarily the star attractions of an infrastructure investment – so we drilled down to a handful of hands-on builders.

These names did considerably better, but the average gain only narrowly edged past the benchmark indexes. Bird Construction Co. Ltd. performed the best, with a gain of 71 per cent, after dividends are included. SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. rose 51 per cent, Aecon Group Inc. rose 41 per cent; Shaw Group Inc. rose 22 per cent; and Germany's E.ON AG rose 25 per cent (all in local currency terms). The average: 42 per cent, or a fraction higher than both the S&P 500 and the S&P/TSX composite index.

This is hardly a scientific survey, but it nevertheless suggests that concept investment strategies – however sound – can have a tough time living up to their hype. Part of the problem is that lofty expectations can be built into stocks ahead of time, leaving little chance that those expectations will be topped.

On the other hand, low expectations can be just the ticket to incredible rewards. Since Mr. Obama put $787-billion to work, beaten-up U.S. financial stocks within the S&P 500 have been among the biggest winners. Without a shovel in sight, these stocks have surged about 80 per cent – or nearly twice the gain of infrastructure stocks.