Had interesting discussions with my Brother-in-Law, Robert Bruns, this weekend.    He has some pretty strong convictions on the direction he feels the market and country is going.   

Although I disagree, I do have a lot of respect for him, for two reasons. 

1. He has worked his way out of debt.  A difficult feet that my wife and I had to endure after college.
2. He is willing to put his money were his mouth is and invest in things that will profit from his predictions.   Too many people are saying, gas prices are just going to go up and up again, I know it...   Well, if you can predict the future so well - bet on it..  Robert feels we are in prolonged US recession/stagflation is coming/US dollars are coming back and flooding our market.  The difference in his opinion and others is, Robert is actually investing in that believe with hopes to profit..  Gotta respect that..

Robert feels that the best investments are those based in other currencies, pay dividends, and include some commodity (gold/silver) correlated stocks.  

But I have my own experiences and have read different books.  My best investment I ever made was in Energy Mutual funds about 3 months after the Enron mess, when no-one wanted to buy energy stocks.   I feel we are in the same situation with financial stocks right now.  No-one is buying them, even with the huge influx of government cash the stocks remain low.  So I am buying financial sector mutual funds.   It is an opinion, but like Robert I am willing to invest my money in it..

So for fun, I am going to compare the performance of my choices ($2000) in one of my kids college funds, that I actually invested,  to what I would have made had I followed Robert Brun's suggested stocks.  So here are the portfolios.

End-Of-Us-Dominance Portfolio

Contrarian US will Recover Portfolio

I do not have a strong record picking stocks, so I very well may lose.    But we will see it should be interesting..