How droll it is to see someone come up with the same approach that everyone has to trading stocks and then dress it up with ribbons to try to make you think it is an entirely new idea.
'Think left,' says ABN Amro, arguing that you will be using the rational left side of your brain by jumping into its Behavioural Finance Japan Fund, as if you normally do your investment thinking with that other half of your brain that responds to infusions of marijuana.
How flattering.
First question and just a niggling one. If indeed this helped you buy Bridgestone cheap as you say it did last October, fellows, did you remember to sell when it popped in November or are you still holding on to this loser? Try the marijuana approach if you are. It may reveal some deep realities.
The idea behind the fund is that most investors are driven in the short term by sentiment and if you concentrate on where sentiment has a share price wrong you stand to make money when fundamentals drive it back to where it should be.
Your correspondent's view is that this may indeed work occasionally in Japan. Japanese institutions are herd investors and few have yet discovered that the only time the herd is all headed one way is when it is bound for the slaughter house. They will happily go there in Tokyo - 'Tchssss . . . what other people doing in Hong Kong market, Mr Kamp san?'
But there is the rub. What are they doing? First of all, for every buyer there is a seller so by definition half the world always takes the opposite view of the other half.
