The Best Opportunities in a Half-Century

In Dec 3, 2011, Barrons had this conversation with Joe Rosenberg, who after beginning his career as an airline analyst at Bache in the 1960s, he was hired in 1973 by the late Larry Tisch at Loews, the New York conglomerate controlled by the Tisch family.

He said

In my 50 years on Wall Street, it is rare that I've been so attracted to some of the best and finest companies. I will name a few, but generally speaking, I feel like a kid in a candy store, because I don't know where to begin. There's Microsoft, Merck, Amgen [AMGN], Johnson & Johnson, Teva Pharmaceutical [TEVA], Staples [SPLS], Oracle [ORCL] and Cisco [CSCO]. The best companies in the world are now some of the cheapest stocks.

He talked about "running scared"

These scares are nothing new in financial history. Sometimes, the scares are financial, and sometimes they are political. I can recall worse scares than the current one. Nobody wanted to go near equities during the Cuban missile crisis. That was a much worse scare than this one. It didn't last as long, but it was much worse, because we were actually on nuclear alert in this country. You can have cheap equity prices or good news, but you can't have both at the same time.


Looking back, bonds have been a great asset class.


The great bond bull market began 30 years ago, in September of 1981. For the past 30 years, 30-year Treasury bonds have outperformed the S&P 500. The last time that phenomenon occurred was in 1842. That is how far back you have to go. Now if you want to look at a period of 20-year outperformance, you have to go back to 1939. While I was around in 1939, I wasn't managing money actively back then.

His picks below.