Michael Mauboussin appeared Friday on Consuelo Mack’s WealthTrack to discuss several of the ideas in his excellent book, Think Twice. Particularly compelling is his story about Triple Crown prospect Big Brown and the advantage of the “outside view” – the statistical one – over the “inside view” – the specific, anecdotal one (excerpted from the book): June 7, 2008 was a [...]
Archive for the ‘Contrarian investment’ Category
Michael Mauboussin on WealthTrack
Posted in About, Behavioral economics, Contrarian investment, Value Investment, tagged Behavioral investing, Michael Mauboussin, Value investing on June 28, 2011 | 3 Comments »
Abnormal Returns on the equity risk premium
Posted in About, Contrarian investment, Stocks, Value Investment, tagged Equity Risk Premium on August 11, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Abnormal Returns has a great post, Blind Men And The Equity Risk Premium, with links to various estimates of the equity risk premium. Tadas says the equity risk premium is sensitive to recent performance, and mean reverting: A recent post at Systematic Relative Strength shows just how different the equity market can look given recent history. They [...]
Wilbur Ross on Charlie Rose
Posted in About, Activist Investors, Contrarian investment, Liquidation, Liquidation Value, Net Current Asset Value, Stocks, tagged Wilbur Ross on August 4, 2010 | 5 Comments »
Charlie Rose has a fantastic interview with Wilbur Ross, who played Willy Tanner (the dad) on Alf before becoming an investor in distressed businesses, most notably in the coal, steel and auto parts industries. This profile describes Ross’s start thus: In 2001, when LTV, a bankrupt steel company based in Cleveland, decided to liquidate, Ross [...]
Niederhoffering the system
Posted in About, Contrarian investment, Stocks, tagged Victor Niederhoffer on June 23, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Slate has a superb interview with Victor Niederhoffer, who I think is one of the most interesting people in finance (or elsewhere, for that matter). A friend gave me his book The Education of a Speculator when I was about 19. It’s a wonderful window into an eclectic, humble intellect, and a great read. Slate introduces [...]
ROIC and reversion to the mean: Part 3
Posted in About, Behavioral economics, Contrarian investment, Net Current Asset Value, Net Quick Stocks, Net Quick Value, Stocks, Value Investment, tagged Mean reversion, Value Investment on April 27, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Recently I’ve been discussing Michael Mauboussin’s December 2007 Mauboussin on Strategy, “Death, Taxes, and Reversion to the Mean; ROIC Patterns: Luck, Persistence, and What to Do About It,” (.pdf) about Mauboussin’s research on the tendency of return on invested capital (ROIC) to revert to the mean (See Part 1 and Part 2). Mauboussin’s report has significant [...]
AAPL: Trade of the decade?
Posted in About, Contrarian investment, Stocks, Value Investment, tagged Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) on April 20, 2010 | 1 Comment »
On October 25, 2001, Apple Inc. (Public, NASDAQ:AAPL) traded at a (split-adjusted) $9.15 per share. Fast-forward to yesterday’s close, and AAPL is a $247.01 stock. For those keeping score at home, that’s a lazy 2,600% in 8 1/2 years, or around 47% p.a. compound. And with a starting market capitalization of $5B, anyone could have [...]
Uncommon lessons from Phil Fisher
Posted in About, Behavioral economics, Contrarian investment, Stocks, Value Investment, tagged Philip A Fisher, Value investing, Value Investment on March 18, 2010 | 10 Comments »
In the Introduction to my 2003 copy of Philip A. Fisher’s Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings, his son, Kenneth L. Fisher, recounts a story about his father that has stuck with me since I first read it. For me, it speaks to Phil Fisher’s eclectic genius, and quirky sense of humor: But one [...]
5 contrarian candidates for mean reversion
Posted in About, Contrarian investment, Stocks, Value Investment, tagged Contrarian investing, Mean reversion on March 9, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Mean reversion is a favorite investment topic here on Greenbackd (see, for example, my posts on Mean reversion in earnings, Contrarian value investment and Lakonishok, Shleifer, and Vishny’s Contrarian Investment, Extrapolation, and Risk). The premise of contrarianism is mean reversion, which is the idea that stocks that have performed poorly in the past will perform better [...]
Walking the talk: Applying back-tested investment strategies in practice
Posted in About, Behavioral economics, Contrarian investment, Liquidation Value, Net Current Asset Value, Net Quick Stocks, Quantitative investment, Stocks, Value Investment, tagged Liquidation, Liquidation Value, NCAV, Net Current Asset Value, Net Net, Net Net Stock, Net Quick Value, Quantitative, Value Investment on February 17, 2010 | 8 Comments »
Aswath Damodaran, a Professor of Finance at the Stern School of Business, has an interesting post on his blog Musings on Markets, Transaction costs and beating the market. Damodaran’s thesis is that transaction costs – broadly defined to include brokerage commissions, spread and the “price impact” of trading (which I believe is an important issue [...]
Three ghosts of bear markets past, redux
Posted in About, Behavioral economics, Contrarian investment, Greenbackd, Net Current Asset Value, Stocks, tagged Japan on February 16, 2010 | 2 Comments »
Speculating about the level of the market is a pastime for fools and knaves, as I have amply demonstrated in the past (or, as Edgar Allen Poe would have it, “I have great faith in fools — self-confidence my friends will call it.”). In April last year I ran a post, Three ghosts of bear markets [...]

