Sometimes It Doesn't Pay to Catch a Falling Knife …

We like to think that a contrarian investment approach works best in the long term. Contrarian does not necessarily mean that one simply tries to fight every trend. It is more about attempting to recognize when a trend has gone too far. In practice this is often more difficult than in theory. The theory is simple enough: buy low, sell high. However, it is nigh impossible to recognize turning points with precision. So a contrarian style often forces one to be patient, and to accept that one will frequently both buy and sell too early.

One way of dealing with this problem is to spread one's purchases and sales out over time. We did this with Japan, to name an example. In “Reconsidering Japan”, which turned out to be a well-timed post, we made the case for Japanese stocks (warning: we have our share of decidedly less well-timed posts). We didn't know at the time that a bull market would be set into motion by what we ultimately consider a catastrophic economic policy, we only knew that the market was cheap. Our own approach was to buy in small sizes over a long time period. It took a lot of patience, as the market simply sat and sat there – the rallies never amounted to much. We felt though that the market represented a contrarian opportunity. We have occasionally mentioned similar opportunities in the past, such as e.g. Greece and even China. As we have pointed out a few times, economic fundamentals and stock market performance are often two different cups of tea. Usually we tend to be “early”, but this doesn't matter if an idea ultimately pans out (gold investors take heart).

There is however one market that has defied contrarians to such an extent that one wonders what the hell happened. Shortly after the bail-out, when we first wrote about the enormous decline in the Cyprus General Index, we did so because at the time it represented the greatest stock market crash in history by far (see: “The Greatest Collapse in History” for details). We also noted that Cyprus was in a very bad position, referring to it as “Iceland without the fish” and a “disaster zone” (which it was/is). The 98% decline in its stock market at the time might have led one to suspect that the place had been hit by an asteroid. Instead it had been hit by the EU, which turned out to be almost as bad, at least financially. We later posted a brief update on the Cypriot disaster area and noted that the market had apparently simply perished (see: “Cyprus – A Stock Market Dies”).