As you know, this week's Barron's features the first installment of the publication's annual roundtable of market experts. It's a consistently great read year after year.
And I especially look forward to the annual event to see what Meryl Witmer of Eagle Capital Partners has to say. She's a value investor and probably the best stock picker most people have never heard of. (But not regular readers of this blog, since several of this site's winning stock picks owe a debt of gratitude to her for bringing them to our attention.)
The roundtables start off with a free for all, where everyone gives his and her thoughts on various market-related topics before getting around to each expert's picks for the year. Everyone was talking about the fate of the US dollar, bonds, the housing bubble, the impact of China and India on the world, etc.
Everyone except Meryl Witmer. She was silent, as Barron's Lauren Rublin eventually noticed saying, "Meryl, you've been too quiet." Witmer: I look at the market from a bottom-up perspective, but I think it's 10% to 12% undervalued. Schafer: One reason I'm kind of bullish is that we are finding a lot of stocks to buy. Witmer: We are more invested, too. That's all she said. That little exchange between Witmer and Oscar Schafer is 40 words and -- for my money -- the most important stuff in the roundtable's first installment. Witmer has been saying over the past couple of roundtables that she couldn't find much to buy (and a lot of what her firm found worth investing in was outside the US). Still, her four stock picks on last year's roundtable all made money. Also, don't get me wrong. The rest of the roundtable is good stuff. Even fascinating. I read it and (if you haven't already) recommend strongly that you do so. You certainly will never see anything like it on CNBC or the FOX Business shows. But I'm a stock picker and the top-down stuff almost never factors into my stock purchases. So I'm anxiously waiting for the coming installment with Meryl Witmer's recommendations. I don't buy everything she does. Yet if her firm is currently more invested than it has been over the past few years, that's something for value investors to note. And hopefully profit from.
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