User:StevenJonKaplan

Steven Jon Kaplan (born May 5, 1960) is a financial newsletter writer and music composer best known for his "True Contrarian" analyses of the worldwide financial markets and for his humorous whaling ballad in the style of the traditional music of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Early life and education
Steven Jon Kaplan was born in Baltimore on May 5, 1960 to his father Irving I. Kaplan, an electrical engineering manager with numerous U.S. patents to his credit, and his mother Jo Sande Kaplan. For a decade, Kaplan was a piano student at Peabody Institute where he spent six years in the musicianship program. This course of study was closely connected with The Walden School, a summer music camp where Kaplan learned valuable lessons as a teenager about music composition and interpersonal relationships, and began to develop his contrarian outlook on life. Kaplan graduated from Milford Mill Academy in 1978 and from the Johns Hopkins University in 1982 with a degree in electrical engineering.

True Contrarian
In August 1996, Kaplan began to publish his ideas online in his blog which came to be known as True Contrarian and which is frequently cited on Seeking Alpha, Barron's , and MarketWatch.com , along with non-mainstream media including Miss Krizia. Kaplan lectures at clubs, high schools, and universities, and teaches a class each week about investing and entrepreneurship at Murry Bergtraum High School in downtown Manhattan. His business manager is Danielle Kerani Oberdier, a budding entrepreneur in her own right, while his videographer Glen P. Charlow is also a performer and graphic designer.

Kaplan's core investing philosophy is that the financial markets will always do whatever ultimately harms the greatest number of investors. Therefore, if you can identify which kinds of investments are either extraordinarily popular or unpopular, and you act in the opposite direction of such a nearly unanimous consensus, then in the long run you will achieve a high degree of success. This may seem simple to understand rationally, but emotionally it is extremely difficult because the mainstream financial media will be repeatedly brainwashing you to do the same as nearly everyone else. It is also essential to act in a gradual, highly disciplined manner, because the most illogical extremes often go to even more absurd extremes before they inevitably regress toward the mean and beyond.

Works
Steven Jon Kaplan released his first CD in 1998, entitled "Temptation". His song "I Long to Go A' Whalin'" ends with the following verse:

I'm livin' the domestic life;

My whalin's gone for good.

I long to cruise the ocean again;

Alas, if ever I could.

I only see the fishes

When they're fryin' in the pan,

And I only feel the water's foam

As I'm cleanin' the pots by hand!

In a later Calypso composition, the last verse of "In a Child's Eyes" considers the world from the point of view of one who is too young to understand complexity:

To a child, love’s unconditional;

Ever modern, yet heartbreakingly traditional.

There is no halfway spot, no lengthy compromising;

You’re either good or not, you’ll soon be realizing.

Should you become their friend, they’ll tell you their best secret things;

And it will never end, the joy that such a friendship brings.

Love is forever with no lies

In a child’s eyes.

In his financial writings, Kaplan commented on his public blog to debunk the popular concept that the United States dollar will surrender its role as the world's reserve currency:

What is often forgotten by investors is that when the global economy began to contract in the second half of 2008 and into the early weeks of 2009, one of the prime beneficiaries was the U.S. Dollar Index, which surged to a three-year peak by early March 2009. The decline of the greenback which began on March 4, 2009 was one of the most reliable signals that worldwide stock markets would initiate a powerful rally, which is of course exactly what they did for roughly two years thereafter. While many believe that China or Switzerland or Japan or some other country has taken over the role of a safe-haven currency, none of the above or any other currency has proven itself during a period of economic crisis. Robert Frost said that home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. The U.S. dollar is often derided when times are good, but when the going gets tough, investors will always crowd into the greenback because there's no other viable alternative which is sufficiently liquid and predictable and which has a proven track record of rallying when almost all risk assets around the world are slumping. When the world goes into a double-dip recession, the U.S. will of course suffer also, but it will be hurt less than almost everywhere else just as had been the case during the previous bear market.

Family
Kaplan's family includes his brother, medical school professor Daniel Lee Kaplan and sister Beth C. Kaplan, an attending emergency-room physician at San Francisco General Hospital. His wife, Karen Bookman Kaplan, is a writer and teacher who recently completed a book about her former career as a hospice chaplain.