Asians take more Risks Than The Swiss

I went to a high class school in Switzerland. Not that we were rich, but in the class there were several very well-to-do Swiss family members. Of the children of these families, most have no more money. 

One still has a lot of money because his grandmother was studying in Paris in her youth and took a liking to the 1910-1920s impressionists. So they have Van Goghs and Renoirs and Matisses — even in the bathroom they have so many of them. The appreciation in value of these paintings was fantastic.

Another one is well-to-do because he inherited money from an uncle of his. So it’s funny that entrepreneurial families that were – at that time — either in construction or the textile industry, are essentially all gone. The largest wealth of my school friends came from inheritances.

I liked Asia when I first came there in 1973. I went to Hong Kong because people were very entrepreneurial and risk takers. They like to gamble and they’re not afraid. In Switzerland everybody is always afraid of losing money. 

In Asia, they take risks and some of the entrepreneurs have become immensely rich — immensely rich starting from zero. These are people that were frugal with themselves. They worked very hard and they also benefited from asset inflation. In Hong Kong, property prices went ballistic over the last 30, 40 years. So anyone who owned properties became very rich.


Contrarian Investor Dr.Marc Faber is an international investor known for his uncanny predictions of the stock market and futures markets around the world.

Good management is management that can adapt to change

I think in every company, you want management that is skillful, that has talent, and preferably that has their interests aligned with yours as a shareholder. In other words, ideally, they own a lot of shares in the company you invest in.

Good management is management that can adapt to change. That is key because when I started to work on Wall Street, the favorite stocks among institutional investors were companies like Sears, JC Penney, Kodak, Xerox, Polaroid, and so forth. Most of these companies have disappeared because management was not able to adjust to the changes in the world.

There was at the time an analyst who followed the photographic industry, in particular Polaroid and Kodak. On the periphery she followed Fuji photo film as well.

Her projections depended on how many people in the world would buy a Polaroid camera over the years, how many pictures the world would take with Kodak cameras, and how much film Kodak would eventually sell.

Eventually, her projections were all surpassed—just not with Kodak film and Polaroid cameras. But with mobile phones that were taking pictures electronically. Nowadays, you see every idiot taking pictures all the time to put on Facebook, or to look at him or herself (nobody is interested in these pictures except themselves!) but it didn’t benefit Kodak and Polaroid.
That is why I always am skeptical about these studies.


 Contrarian Investor Dr.Marc Faber is an international investor known for his uncanny predictions of the stock market and futures markets around the world.