Pettit Funds

Thought this might be worth posting, in view of the current environment of “The Sky Is Falling” sentiments regarding the stock market lately, and gold’s recent new highs. These stats are from this month’s MONEY Magazine.

Invest accordingly:

VALUE OF $10,000 INVESTED IN GOLD IN JAN., 1980 - $10,600

VALUE OF $10,000 INVESTED IN THE S&P 500 JAN., 1980 - $279,000

My hands are always trembling when I make these picks now, but…here goes another try.

This time I’m going with Movado Group, Inc. (MOV), makers of the Movado watches. They have been taking a beating the last little while as they streamlined their operations by cutting out about 35% of their wholesale business. (Gulp!). I guess I’m betting that they are pretty much as low as they are going to go, and that the business is still solid. We’ll see.

Just for fun, I’m taking some smaller positions in Companhia Paranaense de Energia (ELP), which is in the electricity business in Brazil, and Gerdau Ameristeel Corporation (GNA), which is a North American steel producer–not full-fledged picks yet, but they came in as close contenders this time around.

Good luck!

My “long-term” readers are aware (because I write of it fairly often) of my activities at the Marketocracy site: www.marketocracy.com, and which I highly recommend to anyone interested in investing. It has a lot of tools for running “fantasy” portfolios for those of you interested in testing your theories.

There are somewhere around 80,000 fantasy “funds” monitored there. I have several, including one that has been in their (risk-adjusted) Top Ten for almost 3 years solid.

The Top Ten selections (called the m10 at the site) used to be made monthly–but of late the schedule as become more and more, um, sporadic. Until this week, there had not been a reassessment since mid-August of last year.

After a particularly cruel last six months or so in the market, two of our m10 members dropped off (and actually dropped all the way off the Top One Hundred rankings: the m100).

To my relief (and I’m not particularly proud of my last six months’ performance–and my last pick (HAUP) has been a particular stinker this week), I have been selected again as a Top Ten Fund (rankings as of Dec. 15th).

[Applause]

Thank you. Thank you very much…