A Contrarian Conundrum…and Some Quotations

Who is the real contrarian these days?

The Bears, who are dead right about how bad the economy is or the Bulls who are dead right for being long virtually every asset class, the riskier the better?  Perhaps the true contrarian is neutral right now, refusing to play either the economic weakness or the markets’ strength.  My head hurts.

Anyway, I put together a few notable quotations on contrarianism itself while you ponder the above conundrum.  Bon appetite…

The first gets to the very essence of contrarianism, from one of the most famous practitioners of this art, David Dreman:

“I paraphrase Lord Rothschild: ‘The time to buy is when there’s blood on the streets.’”

And the classic take from Warren Buffett:

“We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy, and to be greedy only when others are fearful.”

One from Bernie Schaeffer:

“As contrarians, the only thing to fear is the lack of fear itself”

Perhaps the greatest contrarian investor of all time, Sir John Templeton, weighs in:

“Bull markets are born on pessimism, grown on scepticism, mature on optimism and die on euphoria. The time of maximum pessimism is the best time to buy, and the time of maximum optimism is the best time to sell.”

Here’s a little-known contrarian gem from fund manager and legalized-heroin advocate George Soros:

“The worse a situation becomes the less it takes to turn it around, the bigger the upside.”

This one’s recent, but an instant classic nonetheless.  Arthur Cutten said it yesterday on Jesse’s Cafe Americain:

“But being a contrarian requires a superior sense of what is real, and what is out of synch with reality. In general few amateurs possess this level of judgement and perspective, and end up just looking silly and eccentric after a few correct calls, taking the opposite position because it is the opposite, proclaiming night to be day, and the moon to be cheese.”

These are my favorite contrarian investing quotes, let me know if I missed any good ones.

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