Investment Advice from Jim Grant

For a change of pace here’s some news you can use.

Jim Grant is one of the most respected newsletter writers on Wall Street. He edits: Grant’s Interest Rate Observer. When Jim Grant talks, Street people pay close attention.

Last Wednesday, Grant offered some of his best buys on Yahoo!’s The Daily Ticker:

First: Gold:

The world ought to have much less faith in central banks, and as that reasoned distrust of a broken model grows, the gold price, I think, will appreciate. Gold is cheap at this price.

Second: Russian oil companies, like Lukoil:

These companies priced as if they were going out of business. They're not. The balance sheets are okay. There's insider buying. They are hugely and glisteningly cheap--2.5 to 6.5 times earnings...[they have] reserves in the ground...pay dividends and nobody likes them.

Third: American historical documents.

People are paying immense prices for contemporary artists who have no demonstrated staying power. … "Important American documents are really cheap. For $500,000, for example, you could win at an auction one of the original broadside printings of the American Declaration of independence or you could pay $30 or $40 million dollars for a slab of blue paint.

Yahoo! notes kindly that Grant is not an art critic. But, maybe he knows an asset bubble when he sees one. After all, he was one of the very few who saw the bubble in mortgage backed securities a couple of years before it burst.