12/19/2006

A Contrarian call

There are many who claim to be true contrarians, but true contrarians who are right are rare. One such market analyst whom I track daily is Marc Faber of Gloom, Doom and Boom fame.

He is often right on the money on his market calls. Though he is a bear, he is not perma bear. He makes tactical bullish calls which most of the time work. Like in July, when most USA based market pundits were bearish on the market, Marc Faber was bullish. If you search this site, you will see I linked to his bullish calls on US markets in July/ August/ September period. Now he is bearish and read his analysis below:



"I think as we move into 2007, I noticed globally the wave of optimism, the art dealers are bullish on art, and the commodity traders bullish on commodities, the real estate guys bullish on real estate, the stock traders bullish on stocks, everybody has something to buy," Marc Faber says.

He says this type of an environment is very dangerous and feels that this is a suitable time to liquidate some assets and just sit back and see what happens. He feels that there are no bargains — only some relative bargains like the price of sugar or the price of cotton.

"I do not think that gold is terribly expensive. I think we are very stretched in the asset markets and just looking at the rise we had in markets since July of this year after the correction, we have gone up almost vertically and all the markets are overbought. One reads in the paper about excess liquidity and soft landing and that is the accepted view.

"I will say that basically you should sell stocks and assets when there are no clouds in the sky and you should buy them when there is a thunder and storm and everything looks dismal. Today everything looks wonderful, I could see the global economy is expanding, we have synchronised growth, economically everything looks good, the problem is the inflated asset market, that is the bubble," adds Faber.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

timing is tough...

Unknown said...

its almost like recent days, yesterday and this morning are the red flags - shorters dont want to be too eager unless they have enough margin to survive any retracing, bouncing etc

Pradeep Bonde said...

That is why the game of speculation is so interesting. So many try but few are sucesful.

The sucessful ones besides system have that X factor or the secret sauce which is hard to define and hard to communicate to others.

Using weakness to add to my RHA position.

Unknown said...

its interesting too because, although you havent discussed it much, but you have alluded to the "basket" strategy - that is the opposite of what i have done so far - my focus has to been to hand pick a select few that i have high confidence in - sometimes it works, sometimes no... i also need to work on the art of the protective price stop and temporal stop, too