A reader asked: “Can you evaluate Doug Casey in Guru Grades?”
According to the Casey Research web site, chairman Doug Casey “is widely respected as one of the preeminent authorities on ‘rational speculation,’ especially in the high-potential natural resource sector.” There appear to be no investment performance data or testable methodologies on the site. There are customer testimonials, but many of these are irrelevant or extremely vague with respect to investing performance. It is reasonable to suspect self-interest bias and confirmation bias in any offeror’s sampling of testimonials.
There is an archive of “Doug Casey” articles at Financial Sense, but most of these articles are written by others. There are not enough testable forecasts for the U.S. stock market (per the Guru Grades methodology) directly attributable to Doug Casey in that archive to support useful inference about forecasting accuracy. There are a very few, somewhat dated (2002) references to Doug Casey within MarketWatch, insufficient to form any belief. There are no references to him within TheStreet.com.
In summary, there is not enough public information on these sites to support due diligence on the investment performance of Doug Casey’s advice. There may be enough information in his past writings on specific resource markets/stocks for an assiduous reader to assess his expertise in this specific area.
Prospective subscribers could consider requiring access to Doug Casey’s investing performance data before subscribing.
