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An open love letter to Ken Fisher

Posted on May 8, 2008 by Richard Beddard
Filed Under Markets |

Astute readers of this blog may have noticed I don’t talk about Ken Fisher’s views as much as I did in the early days. There’s a very good reason for that. For over a year now he’s been writing for us on the Interactive Investor mothership so you have plenty of opportunity to read them. Also, I talk more about individual companies, and less about stock markets, than I used to.

Still, I couldn’t let his latest column pass without pointing to it, because it’s so unashamedly belligerent:

I get lots of mail from readers - US, UK, even Germany. No love letters - now, mostly hate mail. Folk are personally offended by my bullish view. Great! The more hate mail, the better - it tells me my bet against the masses is right. If everyone were telling me I’m a genius, then I’d worry.

And I can just imagine the hate mail. Particularly this bit, which must surely have come from the UK:

 You git! This is a credit crunch

He says we’re not experiencing a credit crunch, which I suppose, depends how you define credit crunch, or to which markets you apply the term.

But there’s no arguing, he’s right when he says:

Here we are… world shares down just 2% for the year. Same with British shares!…  World shares are up 14% since mid-March and British shares 15.5%!

And very few people other than Ken would have predicted that six months ago.

From our conversations I know he doesn’t sees himself as a contrarian. Not by design anyway, he doesn’t deliberately take the opposite view. He’s just not swayed by the majority view, and that’s what really winds people up.

He’s arrogant, he’s dismissive, he’s pompous, he’s full of himself, he thinks he’s better than everyone else.

He reminds me that things may not always be how they seem, which is very important, because the last thing I want is to make investment decisions based on the prevailing mood in the market.

So there you go - a little bit of love for Ken.

That ought to get his hackles up.

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