Talk:Contrarian investing

Removal of incorrect information
I removed the phrase that was saying that contrarians had missed most of the rise from WWII. It is not true since the fact that this long rise was punctured by crashes, corrections and consolidations that keep widespread pessimism alive most of the time.

I remove the part that contrarian were against market trend and put that they were against crowd view. It's a commun error to think that contrarians bet on reversal of the trend all the way up. Most of the time, the crowd turn bullish near the end of the trend.

I added a little more detail about how contrarians capitalize on market overreaction, as opposed to simply betting blindly against the market trend. In fact, the contrarian often profits from overall trends by investing in assets that have been temporarily overlooked.

The Links Should Be Changed
The links at the end of this page don't make any sense to me. Individualism has little to do with contrarianism. Noam Chomsky is certainly controversial, but I don't think he's considered a contrarian. I don't know anything about Barry Sussman, but his wikipedia page suggests he's notable for fraud, not for contrarian investing. Also, the external link strikes me as advertising. Kyle J Moore 02:02, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

From the owner of one of the sites in the links
I own quitecontrarian.com. I also contributed a decent amount of the content to this page about a year ago (although the only individuals I discussed were Buffett and Graham). I included the link at that time. Since my site focuses on contrarian investing, I thought the link was appropriate. However, I got a notice saying it was reported as spam and removed. Now I certainly wasn't trying to spam - my site has a single adsense block, but isn't really commercial in nature. It's just a perfectly respectable blog. Articles from my site have been published by Forbes, the Huffington Post, Seeking Alpha, and Yahoo Finance, to name a few. I honestly believed the writing there to be of genuine value to someone interested in this topic.

Anyway, I'm surprised to see that the link is still there, as I thought it had been removed a year ago, and I most certainly did not replace it. But now my site is showing up on spammer report pages, which I don't think is fair, all things considered.

I'm more than happy to remove the link, if desired. I'm wondering now if there's any way to have myself removed from those monitor lists.

24.5.175.148 (talk) 23:55, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

Dreman
Should David Dreman have so much prominence here? The link to his Forbes column doesn't illuminate the topic. And judging by the article titles, he's hardly a contrarian.--80.6.163.58 20:30, 30 May 2007 (UTC)


 * In studying this type of investing I find all arrows eventually point to Dreman, at least when the context is picking US stocks. If you pick up any book on contrarian investing it's likely to talk about Dreman and his books (but not vice versa). He wouldn't be as prominent a reference for value investing, where names like Graham, Dodd, Buffett, Fama/French are more important. This is Dreman's niche though. Heck his boat is supposedly called the contrarian!


 * While any one of his Forbes columns doesn't explain the technique, reading many of them gives a sense of how he identifies these opportunities; also unlike the book & his journal the columns are web-accessible. I think it could be helpful to list other notable contrarians, but I don't know of any that have been so consistent throughout a career or written so much about it.


 * Disclosures: I am a professional investor who uses contrarian strategies. I have no affiliation whatsoever with Dreman, his money management firm or the mutual funds he manages, other than having a dog-eared copy of his book that I first read many years ago.Tb in sf 06:34, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

Planned additions
I am planning to add significant additional information to this page, especially in explaining how contrarian investing differs in key ways from other kinds of investing, and when contrarian investing will tend to be most or least successful.

My name is Steven Jon Kaplan and since 1996 I have been writing on a daily basis about how contrarian investing works in theory and how to apply it in practice. I don't intend to include any links to myself or to promote myself in any way, or to mention my name anywhere on the page itself. I do plan to add numerous relevant links which in my opinion are too sparse on the current page. I would like to add several paragraphs which would be especially relevant in explaining the reasons why contrarian investing is generally successful and when it tends to be least successful. I would specifically like to describe how contrarian investing differs from related concepts like value investing, which in my opinion is the most important section which is missing from the current page. I plan to do this gradually over the next several weeks so that others can see what I have done and make edits/suggestions/changes as they see fit. Any suggestions would be much appreciated. Thank you. StevenJonKaplan 05:18, 29 October 2013 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by StevenJonKaplan (talk • contribs)