Can Turtles Fly?

Being a contrarian, I like to look at underperforming industries*. There are many different ways of approaching this but one simple method I use is to look at under-performing industries over 5 and 10 years. If you are looking at 10-year underperformance, you need to be really careful with industries that are becoming obsolete and possibly on their way to a zero. Something like the newspaper industry is a good example of one that has done horribly over 10 years. Having said that, if you are into deep-value investing, distressed investing, or something along those lines, 10 year lows are a good place to look. Given how the current bull market has lasted almost 8 years--2009 to almost 2017--I think 3 to 5 years is a good time period to look. Depending on what you are trying to do, you don't want to use starting points at the trough of a bear market or a peak of a bull market (for instance, I would avoid any period that started in 2008 or 2009). In the past, I often looked at ...

This is the second post in a series covering my investment strategy for 2009 and beyond. The first post dealt with my macroeconmic view. This post will cover my investing ideas for the year. And in the final post, I will outline my investment ideas and list my watchlist of specific stocks/bonds/etc I'm attracted to. It is important that you not blindly follow anything I do. My stockpicking has been terrible and you should simply consider anything I say as ideas that you should accept or dismiss. I may change my mind at any point. All of this is obvious but I think my readership has gone up and I don't want any newbies losing their life savings. Not a pretty sight if I started getting mentioned in the same breath as Bernie Madoff ;) Views Going Into 2009 As one may sense from my macro outlook, I disagree with the consensus view of a strong recovery in the later part of the year. There is a possibility of a rally in the markets but it is difficult to see it being sustained. Reme...

"The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable." -- John Kenneth Galbraith Making forecasts is never good for one's reputation; but given how my reputation is close to zero or possibly negative, I probably don't lose much by making them ;) This will be my main outlook for the year and the future in general. There will be another post where I will lay out my investment plan for the year (since I am macro-oriented, my investments are mainly driven by my macro view, except for risk arbitrage, distress investing, and such.) To tell you the truth, regardless of how bad you are at it, I think forecasts are actually a good thought exercise if you are macro-inclined . If, however, you are bottom-up then avoiding forecasts is a good idea (in this case, forecasts, which are nothing more than guesses, will adversely cloud your view.) Before I started my blog, I used to write yearly forecasts on some of the forums I was posting on. My forecasts h...