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The investment newsletter industry is known for having some unusual characters. The Libertarian Party has nominated an investment newsletter editor for president not once, but twice.

As MarketWatch, Peter Brimelow looks at the always-contrarian Harry Schultz (sorry, Sir Harry Schultz):

In person, Harry Schultz is small, polite and diffident. But his letter -- one of the oldest in the industry, in business since the 1960s -- is famously self-promoting, not to say megalomaniacal.

For quite a long time, for example, Shultz insisted on being called "Sir Harry" because, he said, he'd been knighted by an obscure authority that no one had heard of. (He's described on the letter's masthead as "Chevalier Harry D. Schultz, KHC, KM, KCPR, KCSA, KCSS.") Similarly, Schultz has cultivated a portentous mystery about why he never returns to the U.S.

Over the years, this has certainly irritated a lot of financial journalists. But Schultz also has an undeniably active and creative mind, expressed in the myriad investment recommendations, sometimes inconsistent, that he makes (for this reason, HFD follows only the recommendations listed in Schultz's "Model Portfolio) and in the offbeat causes that he espouses.

Thus, his most recent monthly letter mourns the death of Chalmers Goodlin, whose Burnelli Lifting Plane design Shultz championed over decades -- claiming, typically, that political and business interests were conspiring to suppress it.

Schultz also has a gift for the big picture. Consider:

While I've watched him, he was an embattled gold bug in the 1970s (vindicated) as well as during the early 1980s both a much-denounced gold quitter (also vindicated) and a bond bull (catching the 20-year bond bull market, one of the greatest in history).

Currently, he's pessimistic on the long-term outlook for the stock market and bullish on gold, essentially because he thinks the U.S. economy finds itself back in the same trap as in the latter 1960s.

But for the short term, he expects stock strength and gold weakness. It's a stimulating combination.

Posted by edelfenbein at December 29, 2005 2:50 PM