www.PrudentBear.com
Figure 1: the home page of prudentbear.com
You know the routine from, ahem, Red State comedian Jeff Foxworthy? The one-liner intro that he has managed to parlay into a successful career as a stand-up comic: "You know you're a redneck if ..."
Well, I don't know rednecks from redcoats, but if you've got several PrudentBear.com entries in your Internet browser's history cache, then I know how to tell if you're a permabear ...
Prudentbear.com, a website founded by David Tice of Tice & Associates, is either the best thing in the world or one of the worst. By that I mean that if any time soon the Dow does rally anywhere near the once-prophesied 36,000 level, then Prudentbear.com might be the last thing that thousands of bearish traders and investors read before taking that long walk off a short pier.
On the other hand, if you are a trader-bearish or bullish-who believes that a healthy dose of skepticism is one of the most valuable commodities a trader can have, (along with a reliable datafeed and reasonable fills), then Prudentbear.com will certainly be among your favorite ports-in or out of the deafening storm of bullish sentiment.
In some ways, PrudentBear.com was blogging before blogging was cool. I should probably take that back. PrudentBear isn't really a blog, but it does share some of the elements that I find valuable in the better blogs. Elements such as a variety of opinions (even within the same general perspective); links to interesting and relevant stories from newspapers, websites, magazines, speeches and other sources; and a few long-form, thematic pieces for both true believers and new converts. Truthfully, I have a hard time-format notwithstanding-telling the difference between PrudentBear and some of my favorite contrarian weblogs and websites.
What do you get when you visit this free, contrarian website? I tend to think of PrudentBear.com as having three main departments. The first department is their "Recent Commentaries" section where you'll find a new article virtually every day from one of PrudentBear's market commentators. Marshall Auerback's "International Perspective," Chad Hudson's "Mid-Week Analysis," Rob Peebles' "Random Walk," and Doug Noland's "Credit Bubble Bulletin" are as worth reading as any quartet of financial and market analysts on the Internet. Plus, this department is rounded out with a weekly guest commentary. Past commentators have included such notable market observers as Dr. Kurt Richebacher, Rick Ackerman, and Bob Hoye.
The second and largest department is the PrudentBear "News." This department alone is worth a daily visit. It's divided into five sections: "Market Movers," "Economy & Federal Reserve," "Market & Finance," "Company & Industry," "International Perspective," and "Bear in Mind." Each section contains articles from sources as diverse as Cbs Marketwatch, the Detroit Free Press, Morgan Stanley Research Reports, and the New York Post. What struck me about this collection is the fact that if we were to read all of these articles separately, from "Demand for luxury homes soars" in Cnn Money to "Panel says India must boost oil reserve" in Reuters, we would likely read, acknowledge, and then walk on. However, seeing these like-minded articles gathered in one place makes it easier to detect trends in the financial, economic, and social worlds. Call it the "anti-Time magazine cover"-fade it at your peril.
The third department, "The Bear Case," really gets to the heart of what the website is all about. This department consists of semi-permanent articles and slide presentations with titles like "A Bear Tour," "Is the Dollar at Risk?" "Why the Bear Market is Not Over?" and "Why Gold?" The articles in this section provide a pretty good crash course for those who are wondering why so many smart people have adopted a secular, or long-term, bearish view on the financial markets. Whether you prefer your doomsday flavored with inflation and gold bugs or deflation and cash kings, PrudentBear does a better job of collecting the more serious-minded and well-articulated arguments against an endlessly rising stock market than any other similarly-themed website I've come across.
Because PrudentBear was founded by a real-life investment advisor, there is also information on the website for those interested in putting their bearish money where their bearish mouths are. Tice & Associates advise mutual fund managers, and David Tice himself is president of Behind the Numbers, LLC, publisher of an institutional research service (with an emphasis on "sell ideas"), also called "Behind the Numbers."
Other features include a "Bear Case Library," which includes more long-form or otherwise extensive takes from the bearish perspective-many of which can be seen as PowerPoint, Flash, or audio presentations-and "Archive," a voluminous collection that includes articles from as early as 1999. Typically enough, the earliest article in the archive is from perhaps the leading credit analyst in the country, Doug Noland, who titled his article "Coins in the Fuse Box."
More than a few years and certainly several coins later, the bulls are still running. But fortunately for those who seek to keep an open mind even when markets are hinting at new highs, the PrudentBear toreadors can be relied upon to keep waving their red capes, not just to taunt the bull, but to serve as a warning to us all that, sooner or later, what goes up will certainly come down.
David Penn is Technical Writer for Stocks & Commodities.--www.prudentbear.com
Originally published in the September 2005 issue of Technical Analysis of STOCKS & COMMODITIES magazine.
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