Death of the contrarian

December 22, 2013 Leave a comment

Death of the contrarian

Dan McCrum

| Dec 19 16:30 | 3 comments | Share

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It has been a year to jump on a bandwagon sailing with the wind at the heart of the pack. Momentum, baby. Let Citi paint you a picture: A two-year, 40 per cent rally in global equities is not the time to be a contrarian (unless you were the bold type calling for it back in the dog days of 2012). Still, Citi warns that the contrarians do tend to do well in January, and they won’t give up:Their big trade for 2014 will be to buy (again) the commodity-related stocks and Emerging Market countries.

Citi has sympathy for buying the developing world, but on commodity gloom, there seems to be a lot of it about.

Meanwhile, at a more local level:

Going into 2014, contrarians in the US will be buying large tech companies and selling biotech and internet stocks. In Europe and EM, they will be buying commodity stocks and selling a mix of industrials, consumer and tech stocks.

So, do you chase fame as the heroic contrarian, knowing that ignominious defeat isnever far away?

Or will it be another year for the thundering herd?

Filed under Macro Trends

Unknown's avatarAbout bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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