Jason Zweig unveils some great research in his latest piece for The Wall Street Journal (“Why Market Forecasts Keep Missing The Mark”). With all sorts of pundits making predictions for where the market will head in 2009, Zweig says you should be skeptical of their forecasts — and your own — a notion that I also examine in detail in my new book, The Guru Investor. Says Zweig, “Nearly all of us try forecasting the… Read More
Jim Collins, author of the top selling business books “Built to Last” and “Good to Great”, speaks with Fortune magazine about what it takes for companies to emerge from difficult periods in history. “A couple of things really jump out,” he says. “No. 1, in times of great duress, tumult, and uncertainty, you have to have moorings.” Highly successful firms have “incredible fabric of values, of underlying ideals or principles that explained why it was… Read More
In his latest Hot List newsletter, Validea CEO John Reese unveils a new guru-based stock selection model, and tells readers that continuing economic woes don’t have to mean continued trouble for the stock market. Reese’s new Guru Strategy is based on the writings of hedge fund master Joel Greenblatt. Greenblatt created quite a stir in the investment world in 2005, when he published “The Little Book that Beats The Market”, in which he explained how… Read More
In an excellent interview with Steve Forbes, Jeremy Grantham — the bear who called both the 2000 market crash and the recent plunge — discusses how he’s avoided the bursting bubbles, talks about the areas of the market that intrigue him now, and reasserts his assertion that stocks are cheap, but likely to get cheaper
Yale endowment manager David Swensen, who has been one of the most successful institutional investors in the world for the past two decades, tells Charlie Rose that the underlying problems involved in the current financial crisis are similar to those from the 1987 and 1998 crises — and that the country now needs to learn the lessons it failed to learn from those previous incidents. Swensen said that ’87 and ’98 both involved extensive use… Read More
Using the research of Jeremy Siegel, Peter Brimelow and Edwin Rubenstein write on MarketWatch that stocks “can’t go all that much lower before getting to unsustainable depths”. The duo — who back in February 2007 wrote that stocks couldn’t get much higher before reaching unsustainable heights — periodically study how short-term market data compares to the 7 percent per year real return that Siegel found the market has produced with remarkable long-term consistency for the… Read More
The American Association of Individual Investors (AAII) recently published its 2008 stock screening review ($$). For those that may not know, AAII has been tracking the performance of its screens since 1998. Through December 5th, the median performance for all of the AAII strategies was -41.7%. But, there was one strategy that was positive. And not only was it positive, but, amazingly, it was up 32.6% for the year through the start of December. I… Read More
In a wide-ranging interview with Dateline NBC’s Tom Brokaw, Warren Buffett says that fear is currently winning out over hope in the U.S. economy — but that he wouldn’t bet against the country’s ability to recover from this crisis and go on to new heights. “Right now fear is [winning],” Buffett said. “It really is an economic Pearl Harbor. … The country is facing something it hasn’t faced since World War II. And [people] are… Read More
In his 2007 book The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb warned of the dangers of a U.S. bank imiplosion. Now, with some of his fears having been realized as the country’s financial system steers though a crisis, Taleb tells Forbes that he doesn’t think the pain is over — and that “the situation is vastly more dangerous than the Great Depression.” “Everyone is in denial,” Taleb told Forbes’ Robert Langreth. “The car is in the… Read More
In Barron’s Roundtable’s second installment, four strategists (Bill Gross, Felix Zulauf, Archie MacAllaster and Abby Cohen) offer up some investment ideas and thoughts on the market. Included in this post are some of their key thoughts and ideas, as well as an updated summary report below.