THE NEW CONTRARIAN INVESTMENT STRATEGY: The Psychology of Stock Market Success

Dreman's 1980 Contrarian Investment Strategy has been extensively revised to examine the pros and cons of a host of new investment possibilities: zero-coupon bonds, exchange-listed options, financial (interest-rate) futures contracts, IRKs, and even NOW accounts. But his heart belongs to common stock, and the crux of his buy-cheap/sell-dear message remains constant. Appreciation-minded investors, concerned with security of capital, should eschew the herd and seek out-of-favor issues with price/earnings ratios below those of the market as a whole. Selected stocks should also boast strong balance sheets, healthy operating rates, and generous dividend yields; ideally, portfolios would consist of 15 to 20 situations in a dozen or so industries. His generally persuasive case still rests, too, on psychological as well as market research, He offers some new studies, this time round, showing just how poor a job most pros make of their fiduciary and advisory responsibilities. Included again are cautionary tales on Holland's Sixteenth-Century tulip mania, the South Sea Bubble, and other of history's grander delusions; added starters are first-rate accounts of Wall Street's eventually frustrated lust for (appropriately enough) gambling stocks and the more recent (equally ruinous) craze for new issues that helped Apple Computer, Genentech, and other fledgling firms longer on potential than performance to sell liberally priced shares to an eager public. Dreman, the authority, has not lest his taste for phrases like ""cognitive bias,"" ""configural reasoning,' and ""groupthink""; but Dreman, the practical and demonstrably successful financial counselor, deserves an attentive re-hearing.