zebra, fwiw, Faber reco'd that stock back around 2002 as well, so it is not exactly a new pick for him. Faber reco'd a couple similar stocks of that ilk and one was a double, the other maybe a four-bagger, within a year's time. i kept a subscription with Faber for a couple years out of gratitude for those picks alone, even though i got tired of his newsletter.
i don't think the recent Grant picks have a full-fledged "Creamer effect", insofar as they don't go up immediately on huge volume, although some are so illiquid that even a little voume causes them to rise.
a great example of that kind of extreme Creamer-like effect was the Gilder effect back in 1999--Gilder had 60,000 subscribers then--probably 10 times more subscribers than the next largest individual newsletter writer at the time!--and his picks caused stocks to stop trading they were so overwhelming--i think in one case an AMEX stock was touted and then halted within a few minutes of his website posting--it then reopened with a gap up in excess of 50 percent--and this was a stock which already had a billion-plus market cap iirc.
for a little while these Gilder touts could be profitably traded, but then hedge funds had 10 guys sitting there constantly refreshing their screens the moment his new issue hit the website and buying whatever new stock was mentioned. it was the same as trying to front-run a Creamer pick on TV.
having said that, i do agree that the Grant picks are getting more momentum than they had in years past. also, his conferences always sell out now and i suspect subscriptions are near an all-time high. some of that might be secular, but part of it is also a frothy market, methinks.
this is different from the 1999/2000, when Grantish value stocks were wallflowers at the dance and the only thing people cared about was tech. now we have all kinds of popular markets--value stocks, commodities, small-cap, growth, even large-cap, EME, gold stocks, currencies, you name it. this seems like an equal-opportunity bubble.
while we're nowhere near Creamer-land, i agree with you that the moves of late have been rather ridiculous, compared to the non-moves on picks from a decade ago. i think it says a lot more about investor psychology than Grant's prowess. |
