My Investing Notebook :: Useful notes on investing. ::

Barron’s: Are there any sectors of the market that you do find attractive?

Duffy: We are long consumer staples, discount retailers and pharmaceuticals. One way to participate is through the Gabelli Healthcare & Wellness Trust [ticker: GRX]. It holds roughly half health care and half global consumer brands in high-quality names like Danone [DA], Nestlé [NSRGY] and CVS Caremark [CVS]. It trades at a 20% discount to net asset value, though it has a fairly high expense ratio of 2.16%. If you look at Big Pharma, during the tech-stock and growth bubble of 2000, these companies traded as growth stocks, with an enterprise value to annual research and development spending of about 50 times. Today they’re trading at 10 to 15 times. We like fallen growth stocks that are cheap, like Wal-Mart Stores [WMT]. The stock has gone nowhere in the last decade, but gross profits have grown 2.7 times.

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We like the VXX, an exchange-traded note that’s based on S&P 500 short-term volatility as measured by the VIX index. It’s down 67% this year, and fits into the whole idea that complacency is very high.

Reference
Barron’s Interview