The Sizemore Investment Letter

It can be a lonely life as a contrarian value investor.  By definition, you constantly find yourself in the minority.  And by betting against the herd, you are subtly (or not so subtly) sending the message that you are smarter than everyone else. This is not the sort of thing that makes your popular at [...]

Barron’s ran a featured story by Kopin Tam in last weekend’s edition titled “Just Don’t Lose It” that was telling.  Tam pointed out that, even after the best January in well over a decade, investors weren’t embracing equities, and neither were their financial advisors.  Only 44 percent of financial advisors planned to increase their clients’ [...]

Sometimes it is really hard to believe that Wall Street is run by serious, highly-educated professionals.  You wouldn’t hear a doctor use a ludicrous expression like “Santa Claus Rally.”  You wouldn’t take an accountant seriously if you heard them utter pithy nonsense like “Don’t frown, average down” or “Buy on the rumor, sell on the [...]

Charles Sizemore was interviewed in a recent article by Reuters’ Lou Carlozo: Amid a burst housing bubble, worldwide jitters over government debt and the high-profile recklessness of some financial movers and shakers, markets in the U.S. and abroad have taken a beating… Risk today, in almost any form, is seen as the enemy by a [...]

2011 has been a rough year for investors.  Stocks, as measured by the S&P 500, are down nearly 8% for the year and down 14% from the April highs.  And while 14% may not sound like all that much in the grand scheme of things, investors felt every point in a surge of volatility that [...]

Will Greece default, or won’t she?  This seems to be the question on every investor’s lips, and the uncertainty surrounding the outcome has the markets on edge. I have no inside information about how this crisis will be resolved, and even if I had the phones of every European leader bugged I’m not sure the [...]

Congratulations, you’ve just lived through the sixth-worst day in the history of the U.S. stock market. The Dow Industrials fell 634 points on Monday in response to Standard & Poor’s downgrade of the United States’ credit rating, and two days later the volatility continues. After a day like that, it’s important to step back and [...]

We’ve always admired Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett. He is, after all, the most successful investor in history and a legend in his own time. Mr. Buffett’s annual reports are fountains of investment wisdom that should be required reading in business schools and for everyone in the money management profession. We’ve also had an admiration [...]

Gold prices topped $1,500 per ounce yesterday, just days after Standard & Poor’s roiled the equity and bond markets by lowering its outlook on the AAA credit rating of the U.S. government. After a decade in which stocks went nowhere and the U.S. dollar lost value to every world currency except the Zimbabwean dollar, many [...]

If there is one asset class best avoided in 2011, it’s gold. At the expense of sounding overly dramatic, gold is an investment whose fundamentals are rotting from within, and you do not want to be anywhere near it when the bottom falls out. In late November, I wrote a short piece for Seeking Alpha [...]