Contrarian Investment Strategies - The Next Generation [Hardcover]

David Dreman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 18, 1998

David Dreman's name is synonymous with the term "contrarian investing," and his contrarian strategies have been proven winners year after year. His techniques have spawned countless imitators, most of whom pay lip service to the buzzword "contrarian," but few can match his performance. His Kemper-Dreman High Return Fund has been the leader since its inception in 1988 -- the number one equity-income fund among all 208 ranked by Lipper Analytical Services, Inc. Dreman is also one of a handful of money managers whose clients have beaten the runaway market over the past five, ten, and fifteen years.

Now, as the longest bull market in the history of the stock market winds down, there is increasing volatility and a great deal of uncertainty. This is the climate that tests the mettle of the pros, the worries of the average investor, and the success of David Dreman's brilliant new strategies for the next millennium.

Contrarian Investment Strategies: The Next Generation shows investors how to outperform professional money managers and profit from potential Wall Street panics -- all in Dreman's trademark style, which The New York Times calls "witty and clear as a silver bell." Dreman reveals a proven, systematic, and safe way to beat the market by buying stocks of good companies when they are currently out of favor. At the heart of his book is a fundamental psychological insight: investors overreact. Dreman demonstrates how investors consistently overvalue the so-called "best" stocks and undervalue the so-called "worst" stocks, and how earnings and other surprises affect the best and worst stocks in opposite ways. Since surprises are a way of life in the market, Dreman shows you how to profit from these surprises with his ingenious new techniques, most of which have been developed in the nineties. You'll learn:

• Why contrarian stocks offer extra protection in bear markets, as well as delivering superior returns when the bull roars.
• Why a high dividend yield is just as important for the aggressive investor as it is for "widows and orphans."
• Why owning Treasury bills and government bonds -- the "safest investments" for centuries -- is like being fully margined at the top of the 1929 market.
• Why Initial Public Offerings are a guaranteed loser's game.
• Why you should avoid Nasdaq ("the market of the next hundred years") like the plague.
• Why crisis, panic, and even market downturns are the contrarian investor's best friend.
• Why the chances of hitting a home run using the Street's best research are worse than being the big winner in the New York State Lottery.

Based on cutting-edge research and irrefutable statistics, David Dreman's revolutionary techniques will benefit professionals and laymen alike.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

All stock-market investors embrace the motto "Buy low, sell high." Few act accordingly, however, for to do so would require that we go against the crowd, buying stocks that are out of favor and selling Wall Street's darlings. Powerful psychological forces prevent us from pursuing a contrarian investment strategy, although it consistently beats the market, according to David Dreman, a seasoned money manager and long-time columnist for Forbes magazine. One of the Street's best-known and most articulate contrarians, Dreman has updated his 1982 investment classic, Contrarian Investment Strategies, using recent research on investor psychology. His revised book combines proven techniques for selecting undervalued stocks with fresh insights on how to defy, and thereby profit from, the popular fears or enthusiasms of the moment.

Dreman pays only cursory attention to a company's business fundamentals in deciding whether to invest in it. Instead he looks for stocks trading at below-market multiples of per-share earnings, cash flow, book value, or dividend yield. Historically, Dreman claims, stocks that are cheap by any of these measures have tended to outperform the market average, although this is disputed by those who believe the stock market is efficient and therefore impossible to beat except by accident. Dreman devotes many pages to debunking their research. He offers a new refinement of his low-price strategy, which involves picking the cheapest stocks within industries, to create a diversified, contrarian portfolio.

Contrarian Investment Strategies: The Next Generation is full of practical and provocative advice, but some of its most interesting passages delve into the abstruse findings of cognitive psychology. This research has proven that we are woefully inadequate as intuitive statisticians. Interpreting data to make predictions about the probability of future events, we consistently make the same mistakes. For example, we exaggerate the likelihood that current trends will continue, even when they are historically exceptional. (Logic dictates that trends are more likely to regress toward the mean.) This fallacy explains why most Wall Street insiders were gloomiest about stocks in 1981, after six years of falling prices, just before the beginning of the greatest bull market ever. Is today's widespread optimism among investors a reason for caution? Dreman thinks so.

It seems our brains are hard-wired to underperform the market. That's why few investors can keep to a contrarian approach. Dreman recommends buying stocks when prices fall, the worse the panic the better. But that requires overriding powerful instincts.

Besides reflecting Dreman's wide reading in finance, psychology, and history, his book also displays his sometimes windy and self-important writing style. At 464 pages, the book is not a quick read. But its intellectual depth and thoroughly tested advice make many other investment books look paltry and superficial by comparison. Serious, independent investors will find it rewarding. --Barry Mitzman

From Library Journal

Manager of the Kemper-Dreman High Return Fund and chair and CEO of Dreman Value Management, Dreman analyzes contrarian investment strategies for the 1990s and into the 21st century, defining contrarian investment as involving buying and selling securities by going against the crowd and prevailing investor opinions. He emphasizes the importance of investor psychology, which he terms "the necessary link required to activate the contrarian strategies we will now examine." Additionally, Dreman describes investor overreaction as a response to events in a predictable fashion: investors "consistently overvalue the prospects of `best' investments and undervalue those of the `worst.'" He presents and discusses 41 contrarian investment rules involving such factors as stock performance, political and financial crises, volatility, and analysts' forecasts. Especially interesting are the specific case studies involving the effect on the securities markets of major crises such as the 1987 stock market "crash" and the Gulf War. Highly recommended for business collections in both public and academic libraries.?Lucy T. Heckman, St. John's Univ. Lib., Jamaica,
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 464 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; First Printing edition (May 18, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684813505
• ISBN-13: 978-0684813509
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (53 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #100,497 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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51 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars good book, but don't buy his Forbes column stock picks, September 16, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Contrarian Investment Strategies - The Next Generation (Hardcover)

The key idea in this book constitutes sound common-sense advice to any investor: buy a diversified portfolio of out-of-favor stocks with sound underlying businesses (e.g., low P/E firms) and sell when the market recognizes their value. The book is controversial because it slams current academic theories on how the market works, especially the idea of "efficient markets". Dreman believes that simply because of the way our minds work, the market tends to systematically over-react or under-react to news (especially earnings reports), and this can be exploited forever (because the way our minds are wired is not going to change). Other controversial ideas: 1) don't buy index funds (because the committees which make indexes tend to put in firms which have had a price run-up and drop firms which have had a price decline, so that buying the index involves buying high and selling low); 2) don't buy NASDAQ stocks unless they have great volume (because NASDAQ market-makers are not regulated enough, and will cheat you on the spread); 3) avoid international (non-US) stocks (because international markets have performed much worse than the US stock market over time); 4) equities are a safer way to hold money than treasury bonds or gold or cash (because of inflation and taxes). The author presents fairly detailed statistical evidence to show that his methods have worked over the past several decades. This is actually evidence that even academics are beginning to notice.

That said, it should be noted that the author's Kemper-Dreman fund (ticker: KDHAX) has done pretty badly in the last few years. Also, some of the stock picks in his Forbes column have been horrible. The most glaring example would be Prison Realty (ticker: PZN), which is currently hovering on the verge of bankruptcy. Dreman recommended it because of its REIT status and its high dividend yield both of which went away shortly after.

My 2c: consider the guy's broad investment strategies with respect, but don't follow his (or anyone else's) picks without putting in your own research.

39 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Long on Stats, a Bit Short on Strategy..., August 1, 2000

By 

S. Schneider (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Contrarian Investment Strategies - The Next Generation (Hardcover)

This is one of perhaps a handful of books the value-oriented investor will likely find indispensable. The book's indispensability is a product of something for which David Dreman deserves great accolades: his apparent monopoly on an expansive array of statistics --statistics to support buying stocks when they are inexpensive in several different respects, statistics to support the avoidance of stocks priced to perfection, and statistics to support the pathetic fallacy of entrusting valuations and earnings estimates to investment house analysts. The stats compiled by Dreman concerning the latter, especially earnings estimates and a particular issue's probability of meeting these estimates over serial quarters, are particularly impressive and sobering. At the very least, all of these statistics serve as a validation for what the value investor has at least accepted intuitively. Yet the reader will probably also derive new ways of looking at securities from a value perspective. (Incidentally, readers who are expecting a rehash of the Tweedy Browne value studies will be pleasantly surprised...)

The two additional sections of the book concern investment strategy and investment psychology. Regarding the former, it is hard to cover strategy satisfactorily in value investing without discussing valuation itself. The central challenge of the value approach is distinguishing what's compellingly cheap from what's cheap for compelling reason. But here Dreman directs readers to other resources, and coyly suggests buying whatever has the largest number of attractive financial ratios. Thus the newcomer to these approaches will likely have ample reading and work to do if he/she really wishes to seriously embrace the task of finding "oversold" securities.

The investment psychology section is useful, but could probably be reduced by half. In fact, Dreman's essential shortcoming is his tendency to bludgeon the reader with the same thought, cloaked slightly differently, several hundred times. Of course, in the world of investment literature, there are worse things than relentless proscriptions against doing stupid things in the marketplace.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must-read, August 21, 2006

By 

Befragt (Midwest USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Contrarian Investment Strategies - The Next Generation (Hardcover)

I have read this book three times now, and intend to do so again. Dreman is obviously an outstanding investor, and his strategies flesh out and arguably "modernize" the techniques used by the noted fundamental investor Benjamin Graham, who was the mentor to Warren Buffett (although, I might add, this book does not emphasize the study of financial statements, which is something Benjamin Graham did in painstaking detail).

Dreman's approach is most notable because of his use of investor psychology and his forceful rejection of the efficient market hypothesis. Instead, Dreman cites any number of studies and examples to support his main thesis: investors over-react to events, and those over-reactions create opportunities for savvy investors to make money. His approach involves a two-part strategy: first, preserve capital, and second, take advantage of market over-reactions to profit. His point is that the market is like a casino, but one in which the odds can favor a knowledgeable investor. In other words, no one can guarantee that a particular stock will do well, but over time, investors who follow a contrarian strategy will outperform the market generally.

Dreman's approach to investing is notably different than much of what is considered "conventional" wisdom within the financial markets (for a good contrasting view, read "Expectations Investing" by Rappaport and Mauboussin). In particular, Dreman takes the position that experts err predictably and often, and that humans base decisions on a minute portion of the information thrown at them. In this respect, his skepticism differs notably from some other authors (example: Mauboussin in "More than What You Know").

From this, he demonstrates how buying low p/e, high yielding, low price/book, and low price/free cash flow stocks results in higher-than-average returns. Dreman shows how favored stocks tend to underperform the market, while out-of-favor companies tend to outperform. However, reappraisal can happen slowly, even glacially.

I found this book to be both enjoyable and informative, and it inspired me to read a couple books about behavioral finance (Paulos, "A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market" and Belsky and Gilovich "Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes and How to Correct Them").

In all, I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in investing. A few other recommendations (other than those listed above) include:

Klarman - "Margin of Safety" (out of print)
Whitman - "The Aggressive Convervative Investor" and "Value Investing"
Greenblatt - "You Can be a Stock Market Genius" (horrible title, great book)
Graham - "Security Analysis" and "the Intelligent Investor"

Each of these books sets forth a somewhat different approach to investing, but at the core, each of them shares a skepticism of the principals underlying the efficient market hypothesis.