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5/1/11

Steve Forbes Interview: Billionaire Investor Ken Fisher ?

Steve Forbes - World Economic Forum Annual Mee...Image by World Economic Forum via Flickr

The Great Humiliator
ForbesKen, good to have you back.
Fisher: Thanks for having me.
Forbes: Well, one always wants somebody who does so well on the market. For example, just to set you up as a great guru, last year the S&P went up 12.8%. The stocks you recommended in your column in Forbes, which you can get at a very good price, went up 18%, and that was after a generous cut for commissions.

Fisher: Well, I appreciate that. I’ve been very lucky over the years in my Forbes columns. I have always been amazed by what good luck I’ve had, and I always think that the next year is going to be a disaster. And so far, I’ve had some years where I didn’t do as well as I should’ve. But I haven’t had disaster picks. I mean, I’ve had some individual ones that have been disasters, of course. But I’ve been very lucky in Forbes over the years. Forbes has been very good to me, too.
Forbes: Well, since you’ve been doing this, in only three years have you underperformed the S&P.
Fisher: Since the accounting began 15 years ago, that’s true. And then, not by a lot. But again, better to be lucky than smart. When I first started writing my column at Forbes — now almost 27 years ago — I never, ever would’ve envisioned that that now, 27 years later, I’d still be writing a column for Forbes. That would’ve been inconceivable to me.
Forbes: Well, you’re also still writing books. So, it may be luck, but you’ve learned how to put the luck into book form. This new one,Debunkery. A lot of clichés out there. You were fond of saying, “That the market is the great humiliator.”
Fisher: I am.
Forbes: And you’re also fond of saying, “Half the success of investing is seeing reality, and the other half is seeing it before others see the reality.” Explain.
Fisher: Well, one of my points is that we operate as people, regularly, not so much as individuals, but as a society, as if we were sort of a community of chimpanzees chittering at each other, and this community doesn’t really have much memory.
Forbes: Investor as ape.
Fisher: Exactly. And we ape each other quite a lot. And in the process of this, one of my views has been that we regularly have things that reoccur over and over again, but we tend to either be blind to them, or we forget them.
And that process, then, causes us to get very excited about things which you can tell, simply by looking at history, aren’t worthy of getting excited over. But we do it over and over again. And some of these are semi-predictable, and the market — which I, as you said, refer to as the great humiliator — exists in my mind (and I don’t mean this literally and seriously) as a sort of a near-living spiritual, almost all-powerful entity that exists for one purpose and one purpose only.
Which is to humiliate as many people as possible, for as many dollars as possible, for as long a time period as possible. And the great humiliator is really good at humiliating, and our job is to engage the great humiliator without ending up too humiliated by it. It wants to get your readers. It would prefer to get me, because I’m more visible than the average reader that you have. It would love to get you, but it would also love to get someone’s aged, demented aunt, because it wants them all.
And to actually engage the great humiliator without ending up too humiliated, we need to have every trick in our arsenal to avoid making critical mistakes. Understanding what are the mythologies that you can prove are false, and also understanding history well enough — which I know you’re a big history buff. That this happened, and this happened, and this happened and nothing bad happened.
We’re seeing that again now, so don’t be too afraid. But everybody is afraid. Every time I ever see fear of a false factor, I know that’s bullish. And so, the part about figuring out reality, and then what people will think about reality before they think it — some of these things are pretty seriously sort of cyclical, and after these kind of things, those things follow.
But people’s memories on these are so shallow that they don’t anticipate that. So, for example, the first third of a bull market is typically led by the stocks that got decimated the most in the back half of the bear market. The back, roughly two-thirds in time, of a bull market, is typically led by stocks that are perceived of as markedly higher quality than they were perceived of at the beginning of that two-thirds of the bull market.
The latter part of bull markets are typically led by stocks that are seen then as high quality, but the ones that do best are the ones that weren’t seen as such high quality before. So, knowing that, you learn as you move through time to position yourself from these kinds of stocks into those kinds of stocks. If you believe, as I do, that we’re kind of in a year, this year, that’s sort of like a pause before the next and last leg of the bull market that might be a couple more years, you want to move yourself into companies that you think can take on a luster of higher image.
Forbes: You have obviously studied markets and their ups and downs, peculiarities and cycles. And, as you note, a bull market doesn’t mean everything goes up. It has its own particularities.
Fisher: Yes.
Forbes: Another thing you look at, referring to the amnesia, is that — in terms of sentiment — that if everybody thinks something is so, it means it’s already reflected in the market. If everyone thinks the world is coming to an end, maybe it is, but it’s probably reflected in the market.
Fisher: Absolutely.
Forbes: A year ago you told me you were bullish, and by golly the markets went up, even though people were highly cautious. Explain today. You said, “Too many people are bulls, too many people are bears, so you’ve got to be very careful. You’ve got to pick very selectively.”
Too Many Bulls and Bears
Fisher: One of the things that I started doing a long time ago — and I wrote about in my 2006 book, The Only Three Questions That Count, but I started writing about this in Forbes a very long time ago — is looking at forecasters’ forecasts for the market, seeing where they cluster, and knowing that the information that everyone has access to has led them to those conclusions. Which is where they’ve already placed their bets. Therefore, that doesn’t happen. Something either much worse happens, or much better happens, normally. But normally, that’s like a bell curve.
Forbes: So, what you’re saying, in effect, is bright people tend to see the world the same way?
Fisher: Yes, absolutely. And then they tend to cluster because they’re seeing the same information, they’re coming to the same conclusions. And usually, that looks kind of like a bell curve, where here’s the average. There’s some a little more bullish, a little less bullish, a few that are a lot more bullish, a few that are a lot more bearish, but it looks a lot like a bell curve.
The rally that started in the middle of last year created an effect that I’ve felt before, but I’ve never been able to quantify before. Which is, instead of a bell curve, it looks like two humps with nothing in the middle. The people who are trend followers became much more bullish, because of what happened in the back of 2010.
The people who weren’t particularly expecting it and weren’t trend followers, became more fearful, because they became acrophobic. They didn’t anticipate the rise, which made them more fear a fall. And then you still had the people who were dug-in-heels bears from the aftermath of 2008 and ‘09. And so we’ve gotten a bifurcated display of sentiment, and the bulls are pretty bullish, the bears are pretty bearish.
There’s this big hole in the middle, in my thinking, for a whole series of reasons. That big hole in the middle is where the market’s most likely to end up this year. People have a hard time with this, because they have a hard time getting that markets are as much about sentiment as they are about fundamentals. And that’s the part about half is seeing reality and half is figuring out what other people are going to think reality is before they think it.
But if the market ends up as I think it will — being a kind of a sideways market this year with a lot of chop, up 5%, down 5%, up 5%, down 5%, going nowhere fast — if that’s the case, a lot of the trend followers will revert back to the middle. As the year gets old, a lot of the people who’ve been holding on to 2008 and 2009 notions, will get over those 2008 and 2009 notions,  because it’s been too long.
And you get back to a normal sentiment display. And then next year the market can move on with gusto into the bull market. Interestingly, the history that few people appreciate, Steve, is that the third year — the third 12 months after a bear market bottom — has never been up huge. The biggest ever for the S&P 500 in its history was one year up 24%. Never up over 13% ever, otherwise, and the biggest negative is down 10%.
You’ve never had a disaster third year after a bear market bottom, and the average returns will be 3.7%. Half the time negative, half the time positive, mostly little ups and little downs. And that’s kind of what you’d expect; it’s sort of the pause that refreshes before the bull market takes off with gusto and leadership changes.
Another Bull Market Leg
Forbes: So right now this is, as you say, the pause that refreshes, and we still have another leg in the bull market?
Fisher: I think so.
Forbes: Looking back on the first part of it, given your scenario, the ones who get killed, resurrect fastest first. That’s small caps?
Fisher: And materials, industries, energy, technology, consumer durables.
Forbes: And for a brief moment, banks?
Fisher: But very brief. The fundamental feature with the banks that people don’t appreciate is that after the first 90 days off the bottom, banks have cumulatively lagged ever since, and big banks have cumulatively lagged ever since. That is, they got a huge pop right off the bottom, but if you didn’t time that perfectly, after that it’s been a loser’s game the whole time. And that’s normal.
Normally, if you have a huge category that leads a bear market all the way down to the bottom — like tech after 2000, or energy in the ‘80-’82 bear market — you get one quick pop, and then years of lag as we fight the old war. I don’t know if you know this, but I read in the newspaper somewhere that some people don’t like bankers. No, no, I, I heard it. Supposedly it’s true, and they want to punish them.
Forbes: They’re still burning them at the stake.
Fisher: They are still burning them at the stake, and that impacts the stocks. It’s interesting to see that many of these bankers weren’t running their banks then, because so many got their heads chopped off. And we don’t like the new ones either.
Stock Market Myths
Forbes: God. Makes you yearn for medieval times, if you’re a banker. But before we get to specific stocks and categories, I just want to touch on some of the myths that you love to debunk in the book. One: Dollar cost averaging?
Fisher: Yeah, this is a real easy one. People do dollar cost averaging because they have regret of making one big mistake. But the fact of the matter is that, mathematically, the market rises more of the time than it falls. It falls, but it rises more of the time than it falls. And if you can’t predict where the market’s going, which almost no one can –
If you can predict where the market’s going, just do what you can predict. If you can’t, which is the presumption of dollar cost averaging or time cost averaging, either one, then you’re trying to ease in. But if the market rises more than it falls most of the time, easing in is, by definition, a loser’s game.
Because more of your money is going in at higher prices, on average, than it’s going in at lower prices. Think of it another way: If you could dollar cost average over the next 30 years, you’re either arguing that we’re in a new paradigm where stocks don’t rise over 30 years, or you’re paying a higher price than if you put it all in today.
Forbes: Another one, P/E ratios. You love that one.
Fisher: P/E ratios are a useful tool for some things, but they’re not predictive of timing, per se. People don’t want to believe that. They really want to believe that valuations are predictive of timing. But I’ve done these mathematics extensively, and over periods as long as three years there is zero predictive power of P/Es.
There is the Schiller Methodology that says that if you adjust the market P/E on a ten year rolling basis, it’s somewhat predictive — but only a little predictive — over the very long term. But even that doesn’t tell you anything about one to three years whatsoever. People use it as a timing tool, but it’s not effective every time.
Forbes: Bonds over stocks?
Fisher: Bonds over stocks are a tricky issue, because it’s all about timing. People think stocks are riskier than bonds, and that is true if you’re talking about very short time horizons. However, most investors — and increasingly as we roll along over the decades — have very long time horizons. Over longer time horizons, bonds are actually riskier than stocks. Even at the point where you take rolling three year periods, as I show in the book, there are more rolling three year periods in history where bonds lose money than there are where stocks lose money.
Stocks For Retirees
Forbes: You also make the point on demographics — and you get into farmers on this — that, age 60, you think, “Boy, I better go short term, retirement looms.” You make the point that most people are probably going to live another 20 or 30 years. You better think equities.
Fisher: You know, when I was young, like a lot of people, about 25, I bought a term life insurance policy to protect my family. I kept paying it, and then I stopped paying it after I made enough money that I didn’t really think I needed it anymore, because it wasn’t significant. It just sat there in a drawer in my home desk.
And after I got to be about 50, I pulled it out, and it had all the stuff that went with it. And I looked at the actuarial tables, and then I got current actuarial tables. And the issue is, if you get to be 50, how long should you live? When I was 25, if I got to be 50, here’s how long I’d live. When I got to be 50, looking at the then current actuarial tables, seven more years had been added to my life just by living 25 years, tied to us living longer from improved medicine, etc. etc. etc. When you and I were young, there was no such thing as senior sports.
When you and I were young, you didn’t find old people out jogging. When pensions were started, people worked until they were 65, and they died at 70 — which is one way to make the pensions work. The fact of the matter is, for example — and people find this perverse, but it’s true — tobacco has always been very good for pension plans, because it kills people at about 70 and it makes the pension plan work.
It’s terrible for the people, but you get my point. Which is: What we’re moving toward is steadily increasing time horizons, and everything that I understand about what’s going on in medical science right now says that’s going to keep going for a long time. In fact, there’s a process in unraveling the human genome that’s actually expanding at a rate, according to the top people in genetics at Johns Hopkins Med, that’s actually faster than Moore’s Law. It’s operating at about six times the rate of Moore’s Law, and it’s one of the most powerful features that people don’t understand today.
That process will create what’s ultimately going to be thought of as individualized medicine, tailored to your genes, which will extend life horizons even further. So, the person that’s 65 today that invests like they have a short time horizon, may well end up living to be 100, because their time horizon, their life expectancy, is going to keep increasing the longer they live. That process means you’ve got a long time horizon. If you put half your portfolio into bonds right now, you almost certainly guarantee that late in life you end up poorer than you would be otherwise.
Forbes: Annuities? You hate annuities?
Fisher: What’s not to hate? You know, if you go and you buy a variable annuity, it is — I’m going to describe this two ways. If you go and buy a million dollars of variable annuities, you just put the salesperson’s kid through private college. The commission’s that big.
Let me describe it another way. My firm, as you know and probably a lot of your viewers know, is one of the largest firms in the world serving the high net worth market. We also have a very nice institutional business, but we’re out marketing and we have salespeople. And our salespeople, for the same amount of assets under management, get paid typically about — they’re sales commission based — but what they get paid is about 1/30th per dollar of assets under management that variable annuity salesperson gets paid.
My standard line is, “If you like the annuity salesperson that much, just give them the money to put their kid through private school, and go invest directly in stocks and bonds. Because you’re going to end up better off that way.” Because all they do is take the money and invest it in stocks and bonds, and they can’t give you a higher return, truly, than the stocks and bonds do.
Load vs. No-Load
Forbes: Another one is that, load funds and no-loads. We all know no-loads do better, but perversely, because of the load, people don’t trade it as much.
Fisher: This is a unique part of this field of behavioral finance that I’ve put a fair amount of time into for a very long time. The load makes people feel like they’re locked in. I can’t sell it because I paid this load. Or, as is done in terms of redemption load, if I sell it too soon they’ll take the load away from me; they’ll charge me this, and therefore I hold on.
So the average no-load fund investor actually only holds their funds about 18 months. Which means they’re inning and outing a lot, and as they’re inning and outing, the more you in and out — unless you’re an exquisite timer, which most people aren’t – the more you’re prone to in and out at the wrong times. And those studies have been proven heavily.
The load fund investor has a much worse vehicle because of the cost of the load, but they hold it so much longer. They actually end up doing better with a worse investment vehicle. So, my argument’s always been — my argument as I’ve said it in Forbes, and said it in Debunkery, and said it in other places — is buy a no-load fund, but make a deal with your spouse where if you’re going to sell it before seven years, you give your spouse the equivalent of a load fee to do whatever your spouse wants to do with it, any way they want. Your spouse is going to love you, and you’re going to be a better investor.
Forbes: You make a good observation about multinationals. We think multinationals, therefore they’re in Japan, Korea, wherever. And you say, “Well, where they’re based affects their behavior.”
Fisher: Absolutely.
Forbes: That there are real characteristics to an American-based multinational, versus an Asian, an European. Explain.
Fisher: Well, we can look at this two ways. One way to look at it is just quantitatively; take the multinationals from different countries and see, does a U.S. multinational act more like a Japanese multinational? Or does it act more like a non-multinational U.S.? And does the Japanese multinational act more like non-multinational Japanese stock? And the answer is, they do.
All multinationals don’t interact like they’re the same thing. They have a little bit of that quality to them, but only a little bit. 85%+ of their action links back to their home country. Now, you can’t do that necessarily for tiny countries, because in almost all tiny countries one or two stocks pretty much make up the whole market and there’s not a statistical base.
But if you take the United States, you take Britain, you take Germany, you take Japan, you take your bigger countries — statistically they act like their home base. The reason this is true is, first, they’re based on home country law. Secondarily, most of their employees come from that home country, so they have home country culture.
Thirdly, most of their financing comes from their home country, so they get home country financing. I mean, these are the reasons, but the proof of the pudding is just in the correlations between the multinationals and the home country stocks being higher than the multinationals to each other.
You cannot successfully globally diversify by buying multinationals alone. That is, buying U.S. multinationals — which there’s nothing wrong with them. But buying U.S. multinationals does not give you the beginnings of global diversification.
Buy American
Forbes: Talking about diversification, you say, “We’re now in an American market.” That overseas, they’ve had their inning, so to speak. Time to come back home. That’s where the action’s going to be.
Fisher: You know, one of my points has always been that in the long term, the capital market’s pricing mechanism wins out over any style, any country, big-cap, small-cap, growth, value; in the long term they do just about the same, if correctly adjusted for real risk. And yet, for three, four, five, and ten years in a row, one category will do better than another category — become hot, become faddish.
Foreign stocks beating U.S. stocks had a good, long run. It’s pretty much finished its time now, and we’re at a point where so many people are fearful of things about the U.S. that are misplaced. Albeit, America has plenty of problems, but the fears are too big and those fears have already been priced into the market. As I said earlier, fear of a false factor is always bullish.
This is a time where U.S. stocks are doing better than non-U.S. stocks, and I think we’re in a multi-year period where they’ll continue to do better than non-U.S. stocks. And when I say that, I don’t mean better than every foreign country, necessarily. I mean better than the aggregate of foreign. Whereas in the prior ten years, very consistently, the total of non-U.S. stocks did better than U.S. stocks. And America really is doing amazingly better than people think it is.
A simple statement of fact, which you don’t just seem to read much, is that as we speak, U.S. nominal and real GDP is at all time highs. Whenever I say that to large audiences, they just drop their jaw. Because in their local hometown newspaper, that is not what they read.
Forbes: What stocks do you like? We’ve talked about pharma — that they’re going to get a boost even if their pipeline isn’t that good. What they do overseas, middle class – they want to live longer, longer longevity — and so therefore they’re going to get even a boost from that even if they don’t have a lot of stuff coming out of the labs.
Fisher: I think one way to perceive that, which I mentioned earlier, is that the latter part of bull markets are led by companies that are seen as higher quality than they had previously been seen as. What companies can, without too many problems, either come up with new products that people really feel they want or need, or can take the existing products that they have and put them into new markets that give them fundamental growth capability.
Pharma has two things that I think happened. Pharma’s normally a late bull market strength. Normally, the last stage of bull markets — and this wasn’t true in the last bull market, because the last bull market got truncated prematurely for all the things we know about. Therefore, it’s more likely to be normal this time.
But one feature that I don’t think people appreciate is, you get to be our age, you go to the doctor for your check up, every other year he finds something to give you a pill for, and by the time you get to be 85 you’re taking more pills. Dementia hits, you can’t even remember which pills to take.
But pretty soon, you’re taking a lot of pills, and then you have to take your dementia pill. The feature of the baby boomers aging will be seen in this bull market, and pharma doesn’t have to come up with new drugs to hit them. And then there’s the emerging market feature. So, these stocks, which are typically low P/E stocks today, can be seen as moderate, low growth vehicles. Which allow them, maybe, to have an increase in multiple of 30%, which is a huge rise.
Forbes: Companies like Pfizer?
Fisher: Yes, but you could go just directly across the board in this category, and then you get down into the picking. I want to go back to my point that increased perception of quality is a function that I think is hard for people to fathom. One of the points that I’m making in my currentForbes column is that another feature that happens late in most bull markets is we develop a new generation of hero CEOs, most of whom then get demolished in the subsequent bear market.
But we get high hopes, and we justify higher evaluations on this guy or gal as a really, really good CEO. And some of them are. Most of them get wiped out by the next bear market. But you look for that CEO that can add luster. You take somebody like Ursula Burns at Xerox. Xerox is not a highly valued stock. They’ve been actually having some great product improvements lately.
It’s fairly cheap. She’s a dream CEO, I think, and she’s brand new. I think before this bull market’s over, she can adopt those qualities that we normally see late in the bull market, that let us say, “Boy, we’ve got a winner here.” Those kinds of things are the things you look for. Which go back to my prior statement; half of it’s seeing reality, and half of it’s figuring out what other people will think reality is before they think it.
Hipsters and Nerdsters
Forbes: You’ve made the point that — in terms of a technology — you’ve mentioned Jim Michaels, our late editor, who liked to observe that usually the moneymakers are those who use the technology, not those who create the technology. You see companies today, whether you call them tech, or consumer, or tech-consumer, like Apple, that you think have a great run — Apple, Nokia, Dolby, Garmin?
Fisher: Well first, going back to Michaels. You know, your family did a genius thing when it put Jim Michaels into his position at Forbes. Jim Michaels was just one of the most precious jewels in the world, and I was really lucky to have him edit me for 15 years. And lots of things that Jim Michaels did and said rubbed off on me, and always for the better.
And Jim’s point that the real winners of technology are not the makers of technology, but those who creatively figure out how to use it to create something that we feel we must have, is a point that most people don’t fundamentally get. So a lot of the companies that people think of as tech companies are really not tech companies.
Tech companies create technology — semi-conductor companies, disk drive companies, laser companies. They make function faster, cheaper, new function that no one has ever had before. Companies like Apple are intelligent consumers of technology to create consumer products for people, and are fundamentally consumer discretionary stocks that are jazzy. The title of the column was, Hipsters and Nerdsters. The nerdsters are the ones that create the technology, the hipsters are the ones that come up with the slick product that we really have to have.
Like, my granddaughter’s musical rocking chair, where she can punch the button with her fingers, and keep changing the tunes. Right? All that is is cheap technology in a toy that that the toy company figures out. And you go into a nursery today and you see this abundantly, compared to when we had young folk. And when you think of that, a company like International Gaming Technology, a company like DreamWorks — these are Garmin, these are classic consumer discretionary companies that buy technology and make nifty product. I don’t think I could live without my Garmin. Although, I used to; and that’s the process of making a consumer discretionary.
Forbes: Now, you don’t have to ask directions.
Fisher: And I don’t get lost.
Forbes: Finally, one company you like is Salesforce.com.
Fisher: Yeah
Forbes: Even though it’s got –
Fisher: An outrageous evaluation. And it’s, as I said in my column, probably the only stock valued at those kind of outrageous prices that I’ve ever recommended in my column. Or, at least, in a long, long, long time. There was a time when I actually did recommend some high priced stocks, back in the days that you remember, in the late ’90s, where I just had this period for years where I said all I had to do was buy the 35 largest stocks.
Forbes: Right.
Fisher: You know, just any half of the 35 largest stocks. It was such a simple concept at the time. Nobody could understand it, but any half of the 35 largest stocks you bought beat the market. Didn’t matter which half, just get big, and that had some high valuation stocks in it.
But Salesforce.com is the prime down the middle player in cloud computing, and Cloud computing as a technology is one of those things that I think becomes beyond buzzwordish during this cycle. If you talk to someone like your friend, George Gilder, he will be quite correct in singing the praises of Cloud computing and talking about its fundamental force.
But if you actually want to buy something that has — and there are no certainties in life — but as high a likelihood as you can get of going straight down the middle in Cloud computing, and distributing that computing ability, Salesforce.com is the play. Other plays are, I think, much riskier in getting, although there’s quite a few others.
Still Like Fracking Stocks?
Forbes: And one final thing. Fracking? Hydraulic fracturing. You hit that at least two years ago. You made the point, it’s been around for awhile but now it’s coming into its own. Still stick with those stocks?
Fisher: Let me say, that there’s a couple of ways to think about fracking. First, it’s really important for people to understand that this has been a dislocating technology. The technology shifted hugely four years ago. This is the original old Mitchell Energy technology that’s been around for a very long time now, part of Devon. And the fact of the matter is that for a long time it went nowhere fast.
It’s a good technology. Yet, environmentalists hate it, and they’re going to continue to hate it for a good long time. And they will ultimately lose, because the shifts in technology are fundamentally powerful, and strong and good. And if you combine good technology with good economics, ultimately you win out.
But the forces of sociology slow down the process of getting into market. This is something that 20 years from now will be huge, and on the way to 20 years from now, we’ll have a series of cycles of optimism and pessimism about the stocks. Which is not abnormal; it’s actually pretty normal. If you go back to invention of the integrated circuit by, simultaneously, Noyce and Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments, you had a long time before it got mass commercialization. The same with the laser, and then –
Forbes: We’ve gone back to electricity.
Fisher: And then these. In the interim over this period, these waves of optimism and pessimism, we’ve had the fracking stocks do pretty well. The fracking stocks, before this bull market’s over, will probably peak out. But they’re probably good through the remaining of this bull market. On the other side of the coin, and you have to be careful about this, the –
Forbes: Natural gas companies?
Fisher: Yes, the flipside of the coin is that, a lot of these, like Devon, are linked at the hip — fracking and natural gas. And the natural gas itself, fracking creates negative price pressure on natural gas, and that negative price pressure on natural gas — which is good for the consumer and good for the deployment of natural gas into other fields.
Like, if I was an environmentalist, I’d believe (but they don’t) that this technology is good, and that natural gas burns so much cleaner than coal. That this becomes an environmental solution, and in the long term, it surely will. But in the short term, what it does, it puts negative pressure on gas price, and while most of our future coal plants will be converted, 20 years from now, into natural gas plants for producing electricity, it still puts pressure in the short to intermediate term on natural gas, and that’s an area to underweight.
Forbes: Ken, thank you.
Fisher: It’s always good to be with you. Thanks for having me back, Steve.
Forbes: The book, again, Debunkery
source: forbes.com

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