From today's Gartman Letter
SHARE PRICES, LIKE NON-US
DOLLARS, BEGAN THE YEAR ON A
VERY FIRMLY, led higher by the “infrastructure”
plays such as steel, heavy equipment, railroads, et al.
As noted in our “recommendation section below, we
have returned to trading as the New Year has begun,
and we have done so by accepting… aggressively…
exposure to precisely these stocks. Further, beyond
the “infrastructure” component, the stocks we’ve
discussed at length here in our commentaries are also
solid “dividend paying” companies, with dividends that
are quite well covered and whose earnings are
materially cyclical in nature. We like “prosaic.” We like
boring; We admire consistency of purpose and we like
longevity. So we own Deere; and we own
ConocoPhillips; and we own US Steel and Norfolk
Southern Railroad, and GE and the like. We shall let
others wiser than we buy high-tech pharma, or dabble
in nano-technology, or have exposure to DNA
investigation, or invest in the next generations of
computer technology. These are all far beyond our
ken. We’ll make our bets and take our changes with
“top down” economic forecasting, betting that railroads,
and banks and oil will all do well as the economy
begins to rise later this year.
Further, we note that our old friend, and long standing
client, Bill Fleckenstein, who has run one of the most
successful “short only” hedge funds for many years,
has chosen to close his fund! We take it very seriously
that Bill has chosen to close down his fund and has
returned all of the money to his investors, stating rather
publically that there are simply too few stocks to be
short of, and a vast number that are compelling on the
long side. When Bill “speaks” this loudly, only the
foolish among us refuse to listen:
