Learning to Love Lousy Stocks

Sometimes, it’s best to rip up the playbook, hold your nose and buy some of the worst stocks you can find. That’s the message from Jonathan Golub, chief U.S. equity strategist at Credit Suisse. He joined this week’s “What Goes Up” podcast to explain.

“We like high quality portfolios, we like stocks that don’t have a lot of debt, we like stocks with growth and big global footprints,” Golub says. “But every one of those characteristics does well—or poorly—in certain situations.” Right now, the latter is the case, he contends. “Companies with deteriorating fundamentals that are heavily shorted are outperforming the market. And you wouldn’t normally think that, because those sound like they are negative characteristics.”

A company is shorted because investors somewhere are betting its headed for bankruptcy, which Golub says makes sense in a weak economy. But if the economy turns around, he adds, “they’re going to actually improve more than a really healthy company. And this is really frustrating for investors with a quality bias.”

Also joining the podcast is Bloomberg reporter Lananh Nguyen to discuss the takeaways from a busy week in bank earnings.

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