The Importance of Being Different Tocqueville Asset Management

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“Whenever people agree with me, I always feel I must be wrong.”
-Oscar Wilde
and,

"Volatility is a natural companion of superior long-term returns but it is very different from risk, which is the possibility of permanently losing one’s capital. Volatility, by contrast, is merely a series of shorter-term aberrations that, for serious investors, should be viewed as opportunities."

finally,

"...momentum followers are right most of the time. However, while they are, they usually do not stand to make as much money as they hoped because the consensus expectations for the future that underlie the momentum approach (a continuation of the recent past) are already largely incorporated in the current prices for securities and the markets. In contrast, contrarian investors are right mostly at major turning points, after securities or markets have become grossly overvalued or undervalued. As a result, they are right less often but, when they are, they stand to make large profits or avoid large losses.

Good read:
tocqueville

STB65

Having invested a portion of my son's Roth IRA in this fund before the crash (primarily relying on the impression of others that Delafield was a manager to rely on, and wanting a small cap component), I have yet to see it break even, despite the chart on M* showing a gain. Comparing their M* chart to BOGLX, a fund in which M* also has little faith as evidenced by their downgrade (I invested over a decade ago), I see BOGLX has a much better percentile rating than TSELX over the past 3 years, part of which included a small cap resurgence.
I really do like Oscar, of whom Dorothy Parker said:
"If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to try an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it."

I'm not sure how much credence to give to the fund managers' ability to match their rhetoric (or Oscar's borrowed quote) with their performance. When your rank is below 50th percentile for several years, you have to say something. I'd been averaging in with an after tax account, but I'm thinking of giving up. I think I'll hang with Cinnamond a while longer though, so this shows that I may not have a clue.

To maintain the theme, three more from Oscar:
1. I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.
2. When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is.
3.(Substitute investors for children and fund managers for parents) Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.