Contrarian Investment Strategies: The Psychological Edge [Hardcover]

David Dreman (Author)

Book Description

Release date: January 10, 2012

In this major revision of his investment classic, one of the premier investment managers introduces vitally important new findings in psychology that show why most investment strategies are fatally flawed and his contrarian strategies are the best way to beat the market.

The need to switch to a new approach for investing has never been more urgent. The Crash of 2007 revealed in dramatic fashion that there are glaring flaws in the theory that underlies all of the prevailing investment strategiesefficient market theory. This theory, and all of the most popular investing strategies, fail to account for major, systematic errors in human judgment that the powerful new research in psychology David Dreman introduces has revealed, such as emotional over-reactions and a host of mental shortcuts in judgment that lead to wild over and under-valuations of stocks, bonds, and commodities and to bubbles and crashes. It also leads to horribly flawed assessments of risk.

Dreman shows exactly how the new psychological findings definitively refute those strategies and reveals how his alternative contrarian strategies do a powerful job of accounting for them. He shows readers how by being aware of these new findings, they can become saavy psychological investors, crash-proofing their portfolios and earning market beating long-term returns. He also introduces a new theory of risk and substantially updates his core contrarian strategies with a number of highly effective methods for facing the most pressing challenges in the coming years, such as greatly increased volatility and the prospect of inflation. This is every investors essential guide to optimal investing.

Editorial Reviews

Review

David Dreman is known on Wall Street as a contrarian, a label that fails toappreciate his deep knowledge of the market and research into investor psychology. In Contrarian Investment Strategies: The Psychological EdgeDremanlays bare the deficiencies ofthe efficient market hypothesis, theinvestment rationale that states stock prices incorporate all known information. He also provides decades worth of data to show the woeful inaccuracy of analysts' forecasts. With the knowledge that the Street is marching to a flaweddrumbeat, Dreman offers adviceon how to react whenmarkets misprice assets.Dreman has made a career of leaning heavily against the prevailing wind and for the most part, been highly successful. For thosewary of following the herd, Dreman's thinking isrevealing. Hebert Lash, Correspondent, Reuters

About the Author

David Dreman is the founder and chairman of Dreman Value Management L.L.C. in New York Red Bank, New Jersey, a firm which currently manages over 4 billion dollars of individual and institutional funds.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 496 pages
• Publisher: Free Press (January 10, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743297962
• ISBN-13: 978-0743297967
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 1.4 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #54,683 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 37 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Role of Psychology in Investing. January 10, 2012

By AdamSmythe

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This is a substantial, well-organized work by one the pioneers in what is today called behavioral finance/investing. As he has been doing since the late 1970s, author David Dreman states his case that the academically-popular Efficient Market Hypothesis (sometimes oversimplified as the "random walk theory") doesn't adequately recognize or account for the fact that psychology plays an important part in investment decisions. To help make his points, Dreman guides the reader through major investment bubbles and panics, starting back with Holland's tulip bubble in the 1630s and progressing through the more recent real estate bubble. (Some of the important aspects of volatile markets have remained quite similar over the centuries. The reason, according to Dreman, is that while the investing environment may have changed over the years, human psychology hasn't changed nearly as much.) Dreman makes his arguments, backs them up with lots of data and discussion, and offers his views on how to (1) make volatile investment environments seem less scary, and (2) take advantage of the opportunities that develop in volatile times. You don't need degrees in finance, business, economics or psychology to enjoy this book. It is written for the intelligent lay reader, and my guess is that most people with an interest in investing will find it very readable.

This is Dreman's fifth book on investing (see below), and given the similarity of titles I wondered just how different this book would be from the earlier versions. Here's a list of his works:

com/Psychology-Stock-Market-Investment-Strategy/dp/0814454291">Psychology and the Stock Market: Investment Strategy Beyond Random Walk, written in 1977,

Contrarian Investment Strategy, (1980),

The New Contrarian Investment Strategy, (1982),

Contrarian Investment Strategies - The Next Generation, (1998) and

Contrarian Investment Strategies: The Psychological Edge, (2012).

Having followed Dreman for a long time and read his books, here is my conclusion: The current version is substantially new and makes for an informative, enjoyable read. However, while the illustrative material and discussion are largely new, Dreman's arguments for contrarian investing are, at their root, similar to those he's made since 1977. If you haven't read his earlier books, this is an excellent introduction to and exposition of contrarian investing. If you have read his earlier books and are looking for a different investment theme, look elsewhere. If you've read his earlier books and are interested in more material on contrarian investing, there's a lot of good information in this book. I got my money's worth.

The book is organized into five parts:

Part 1: "What State-of-the-Art Psychology Shows Us." This part includes a history of manias and bubbles, with emphasis on the aspects of human psychology that contribute to these episodes.

Part 2: "The New Dark Ages." Dreman describes how the Efficient Market Hypothesis came to be accepted by many academics and how it affected the way large institutions (mutual funds and pension funds, for example) invested their money.

Part 3: "Flawed Forecasting and Poor Investment Returns." Dreman argues that economic forecasting is very difficult, and investment strategies based on developing a better forecast of next year's GDP are going to prove to be disappointing sooner or later.

Part 4: "Market Overreaction: The New Investment Paradigm." These chapters represent the core of Dreman's contrarian strategies. Simply stated, markets have a demonstrated history of going to extremes, each time with a believable "this time is different" story. However, if you can keep from becoming caught up in the conventional wisdom of the day, you can work to exploit market overreactions.

Part 5: "The Challenges and Opportunities Ahead." Dreman discusses today's specific economic and investment environments, problems and possibilities.

Don't buy this book with the expectation of discovering specific stock recommendations, because you won't find them. Similarly, don't buy this book with the expectation that the author hasn't fallen for some of the same mistakes he describes in this book, because he has. Investing is tough, and every investor is going to make plenty of mistakes. However, if you want stimulating food for thought, this is an interesting and informative book. While I wouldn't recommend it to a confirmed "technical" analyst, I do recommend it to those who are open to the concept of contrarian investing. Read more ›

28 of 35 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing waste of time April 6, 2012

By words

Format:Hardcover

I was very disappointed with this book. I work professionally in the investment industry and have my whole life, and have read dozens of books about investing, but rarely has one let me down like this one. And the reason is very simple: Dreman seems to have forgotten who this book was written FOR. It is the reader who spends their money and their time on this book, and it is the reader who should be rewarded for this. Such is not the case. At least 80% of this book is dedicated to Dreman arguing with his nameless critics, or the "academics" and EMH proponents who just aren't smart enough to see things his way. Obviously, anyone reading a book like this is interested in investing strategies--in picking up insights that help them invest successfully and perhaps even beat the market. I really didn't need to spend several hundred pages hearing about why EMH hypothesis is wrong. Anyone who picks up this book probably feels this way already, and doesn't need more than a page or two of reminding. The subject is dealt with successfully (and briefly) in other investment books, by Klarman, Greenblatt, Greenwald, etc, but NONE of those authors wasted as much time as Dreman does on it. It seems that Dreman feels himself slighted by the academic community, and he uses this book to beat that point into the ground. If this had been titled "Why the Academics Are Wrong, in 500 Pages", I personally would have saved my money and my time. The publishers should be ashamed of themselves on this one. In the end, I learned nothing here, and felt cheated by the book. I have to give this one star, and feel compelled to warn other readers that there is very little of value in this book. I hope you will save your money.

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Insightful February 4, 2012

By Behavioral Investors

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Having read and enjoyed his 1997 "Contrarian Investment Strategies - The Next Generation", I was pleased to see this comprehensive updated edition by longtime contrarian value investor David Dreman. By and large the content of the book is entirely new; encompassing a brief discussion of research findings in behavioral finance and their relevance to value investing, a fairly devastating critique of the widely-used conventional concepts of risk and return embodied in the efficient market hypothesis (EMH), and a thorough (though not enitrely novel) review of the significant long-term outperformance of several basic value investing strategies.

BEHAVIORAL FINANCE: THEORY AND APPLICATIONS

Readers who have followed behavioral economics may find his descriptions occasionally a little stilted, but in general Dreman provides a useful summary of several basic findings on human behavioral biases and heuristics in financial decision-making, and how these create opportunities for value investors to outperform significantly over the long term. As I think most of its practitioners would agree, at its core behavioral investing is essentially value investing: an attempt to avoid and reverse the systematically poor performance of the majority of mainstream investors by avoiding biases through an explicit focus on objective measures of business value.

As a neurologist, I was particularly interested by Dreman's mention of the role of the neurotransmitter dopamine in expectation and reward.... As Dreman expostulates, a large part of the significant excess returns of value stocks are realized subsequent to positive earnings surprises, which have a systematically much greater positive effect on stocks which are undervalued using basic metrics than on their overvalued peers. The representativeness heuristic causes investors to simplistically label individual companies as "good" or "bad" investments regardless of their current valuation, developing binary and often unrealistic expectations about future results. Overconfidence and biased self-attribution lead to inaccurate perception of the accuracy of earnings estimates developed by analysts and investors themselves, making surprises both far more frequent and far more extreme than conventional investors anticipate. As a gross simplification, the neurobiology of the dopamine reward system conditions human beings to experience pleasure and pain in proportion to the degree to which their actual experiences depart from their prior expectations of them. The interaction of these biases sets the stage for extreme positive returns from upside surprises in the undervalued stocks neglected and shunned by most investors, as well as disproportionately painful downside surprises in the most popular stocks (the very stocks chased by the majority of individual and institutional investors, who coincidentally have performed so poorly while value investors have done rather well).

Dreman may somewhat overstate the degree to which a single such surprise accounts for the durable long-term outperformance of value stocks: the evidence shows that the difference in excess return between undervalued stocks experiencing positive and negative surprises becomes less significant after 3 quarters, while both categories outperform the market strongly for more than a 5 to 8 year period. However, I strongly agree that understanding the actual behavioral and neural substrates of human decision making provides a much more comprehensive and powerful framework for investment strategy than a blind reliance on convenient EMH assumptions that remain impossible for most conventional investors to abandon, yet have been thoroughly and demonstrably discredited by years of empirical evidence.

"THE NEW DARK AGES": A FRONTAL ASSAULT ON EFFICIENT MARKET ASSUMPTIONS

I have always had somewhat mixed feelings about attempts to directly attack the efficient market hypothesis in book form. The degree of commitment to assumptions of rational behavior among conventional investors is so ingrained (in the face of decades of clear evidence to the contrary) that such attempts are almost invariably preaching to the choir. From a selfish perspective, it's more profitable to personally identify and act on mispriced investment opportunities resulting from market misperceptions than to spend time proselytizing the merits of deep value investing to a general audience, many of whom will realistically never be able to embrace such a strategy for behavioral reasons. Nevertheless Dreman provides a trenchant and valuable critique, with a particular focus on instances where EMH assumptions about the nature of risk and return have been repeatedly violated. In spite of some preexisting familiarity, I came away rather amazed by the lack of good real-world evidence behind many of the financial models still being used today, and the resulting inability of conventional investors to consider factors such as liquidity, leverage, and intrinsic business value in thinking about risk and return.

Dreman is at his best when narrating his own experiences as an analyst and investor during multiple periods of optimism and pessimism, spanning multiple fascinating periods of irrationality including the Nifty Fifty, the "go-go" 1960s and subsequent bear market and rejection of stocks, the turn-of-the-century internet bubble, and so on. His clearly worded exposition of how naive EMH assumptions about the nature of volatility, risk, and liquidity contributed to the 1987 crash (and yet again the Long Term Capital Management debacle, and the 2000s mortgage securitization boom and bust) was particularly telling.

CONTRARIAN INVESTMENT STRATEGIES: THE PSYCHOLOGICAL EDGE?

In view of the above insights and the title, I was hoping for a more nuanced discussion of some of the specific applications of behavioral finance in fine-tuning a basic value investing approach. The "contrarian" strategies discussed in the book are neither particularly novel nor explicitly different from basic ratio-based value strategies (price/earnings, price/book, price/cash flow, dividend yield, and rankings of the same metrics relative to firms within the same industry) which should be familiar to any reader of Graham or O'Shaughnessy, or indeed to most market participants. There is something to be said for adhering to a rules-based value methodology that removes human bias from the equation. For example, Joel Greenblatt has recently presented evidence that most individual and institutional investors who attempted to individual stock selection based on adding their personal judgements to results of a basic "Magic Formula" screen have in general substantially underperformed a simpler mechanical strategy using raw formula rankings themselves. For most investors, an attempt to apply subjective judgement simply reintroduces the biases which a formulaic approach to value investing is meant to eliminate.

However. the fact remains that overreliance on raw reported valuation ratios can in many cases be a naive strategy with significant pitfalls for investors. As one trivial example, in recent years many investors have been seriously blindsided by investing in fradulent Chinese reverse mergers, where apparent undervaluation on reported numbers could in most cases be belied by a modicum of individual research by a seasoned value investing practitioner, however subjective this may seem. Many entirely mechanical "quant" strategies being marketed to the public as value investing have in fact backfired. To the extent that very simple ratio-based methods become popular, there will be an increasing premium for value investors who can successfully incorporate subjective judgements while attempting to consciously avoid behavioral errors. This is likely to be a difficult and nuanced task that few can realistically achieve, but is an important part of the skill set of highly successful value investors such as Warren Buffett, so it's a pity that Dreman did not discuss the many instances where behavioral finance can help guide judgements of a more subjective nature.

CONCLUSION

Apart from the basic value strategies described above, the final chapters do include some discussion of several important situational sources of market risk arising from behavioral factors. Dreman again makes points worth repeating about the intellectual bankruptcy of the traditional EMH concepts of risk based on historical volatility and beta, assumptions still in use today by all too many market participants despite repeated devastating failures in the past. Drawing insightfully on the lessons of 1987 (portfolio insurance), 1998 (LTCM leveraged arbitrage) and 2008 (mortgage securitization), Dreman correctly emphasizes the significant roles of liquidity and leverage as intrinsic sources of real risk, which are strangely not perceived as risk by the majority of conventional investors.

All in all, Dreman's book is a solid presentation of many core research findings about the long-term outperformance of basic value strategies, and draws valid parallels between basic value investing and behavioral finance, in addition to illustrating how the prevalence of EMH assumptions contribute to the development of often glaring misperceptions by conventional investors about real-world risk and return. Readers more interested in an introductory exposition of behavioral and neuroeconomic research may enjoy Jason Zweig's Your Money and Your Brain: How the New Science of Neuroeconomics Can Help Make You Rich; while those wanting a more comprehensive exploration of direct applications in behavioral finance may be interested in James Montier's Behavioural Investing: A Practitioners Guide to Applying Behavioural Finance (The Wiley Finance Series), or The Little Book of Behavioral Investing: How not to be your own worst enemy (Little Books, Big Profits (UK)) by the same author. Read more ›