By Greg Edwards
Dow Jones Newswires
Friday, April 22, 2005
ST. LOUIS -- Wistar Holt says he's the only money manager
in St. Louis who is a true bear.
How bearish is he?
The only equities that Holt buys are gold-mining stocks.
And he's been doing that since January 2001.
"Gold is the place to be, almost exclusively," Holt said.
His firm, Holt & Shapard Capital Management, manages
$40 million in assets for about 250 clients, mostly
individuals. The accounts are fully discretionary and
fee-based.
Holt said he became concerned about the valuation of
the market in late 2000, got out entirely in January 2001,
and began looking for other investments to hedge a downturn
in the economy.
"The only thing I could come up with was gold," Holt said.
"It had just gone through a 20-year bear market, hitting
a low of $255 an ounce in January '01, from $850 an ounce
in May 1980." Recently it has been at about $435 an ounce.
Today Holt & Shapard's investments are 70 percent in
precious metals mining stocks, 15 percent in the Prudent
Bear Fund, and 15 percentin the Prudent Global Income Fund,
a foreign government bond fund.
The mining stocks are Agnico-Eagle Mines Ltd. (AEM), Gold
Fields Ltd. (GFI), Goldcorp Inc. (GG), Hecla Mining Co.
(HL), Coeur d'Alene Mines Corp. (CDE), Harmony Gold
Mining Co. (HMY), and Newmont Mining Corp. (NEM).
Because his portfolio is so heavily concentrated in one
area, Holt chose large-cap stocks to minimize risk.
"The criteria for all of these is that they are
primarily large-cap, established companies and they are
also unhedged," Holt said. "If you are in a gold bull
market, you don't want to be selling years-out production because you may be locking yourself into a price that
ends up being significantly lower than it is when that
time comes."
Holt's returns, net after fees, were 31.2 percent in 2001,
155 percent in 2002, 20.1 percent in 2003, a loss of 17
percent in 2004, and a loss of 4.2 percent through the first quarter of this year.
Holt isn't discouraged by the downturn this year and last:
"We think gold is still very much in a long-term bull
market," he said.
"I think gold will do well for several more years,
maybe even longer," he said. "At some point, gold will
get overvalued, and the market will presumably be
undervalued, and I may go 180 degrees back the other way."
However, he said, "we're miles from that now."
Holt said his investing style has long been "deep value."
He spent 22 years with Wall Street firms, including Smith
Barney and Paine Webber. Eventually, he said, he no longer
fit in.
"My style just ran counter to Wall Street and New York,"
he said. "I was pressured to buy traditional equities, to
not be so bearish."
Holt said the administration and the Federal Reserve have
done everything they can in recent years to stimulate the economy and forestall a recession.
"According to Austrian economics, which I subscribe to,"
Holt said, "when you massively stimulate the economy to
avoid a downturn, all you're really doing is deferring it.
"The downturn will be worse because of this," he said.
"That's why we remain entirely out of traditional equities."