Mr. Puplava: We are a money management firm and run our own Registered Investment Advisor business, Puplava Financial Services, Inc., as well as our own broker dealer, Puplava Securities, Inc., and our educational arm, Financial Senseฎ. We manage in the neighborhood of about 300 million today with about 75% of that managed accounts and about 25% in brokerage accounts. If I were to describe our philosophy, I would say we're more from the value side of investing. We try to buy things when we think they're cheap and offering compelling values. On the other hand we also believe in long-term themes. We think that if you dissect the markets over periods of time, there are definite trends that drive the markets; stocks from after World War II to 1966, commodities from 1966 to 1982, Japan in the 1980s, US technology stocks in the 1990s, and then in this decade it's been commodities. We try to identify long-term themes in the market and then we try to buy the best values in those markets and hold for the long term.
TWST: Is it still your long-term theme that commodities are the way to invest?
Mr. Puplava: Yes, I believe that we're going through a corrective cycle here.
You've got two forces that are opposing each other right now. You have the
private sector that is, to some extent, deflating investment pullback, and then
you have a pullback in consumer demand. On the other hand you have an expansion
of government intervention in the economy and the markets, whether it's fiscal
policy, rebates or bailouts. I think these two opposing forces are fighting
against each other and I think it helps to explain a lot of what you see taking
place in the markets today, where stocks are up one day and you think you want
to be long, then the next day they're down and you think you want to be short
it's almost a rotation that takes place every day.
Tickers included in this excerpt: PBR, POT, CHK, ECA, RIG, SLB, CCJ, Mon, AGU, MOS
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