Kass: Tune Out Pundits,Test Your Convictions

This blog post originally appeared on RealMoney Silver on Feb. 8 at 7:57 a.m. EST.

To paraphrase Clarence Darrow, "I try to chase after the (economic/investment) truth like all hell."

One often doesn't touch truth's coattails, especially in such volatile and ephemeral times, but we should try to get close. That said, in such a testy and uncertain period as today, investment convictions must always be continually tested, and conclusions must always be qualified.

As subscribers recognize, after seven years at my perch, I am self-critical, and I constantly test my views and often spend time on the cold linoleum floor, drinking cheap tequila. I am often early, especially in forecasting cyclical turning points, and I am sometimes wrong, but logic of argument and objectivity remain my basic tenets.

Of course, the truth will set you free, in life and in markets, but first it will make you miserable.

Dogma and glibness is an investors' bogeyman. I try to avoid both at all cost, and I try to avoid investment losses by staying disciplined and by not letting my losses run.

For these reasons and others, I threw the gauntlet down on Ben Stein last night on "Kudlow & Company."

Stated simply, investors should not take advice from any part-timers (especially of a media-kind), who lack analytical rigor and who maintain a false sense of market causality, alternatively blaming the media, Goldman Sachs (GS Quote) and traders for falling prices. Nor should investors automatically listen to people like myself, who tend to emphasize the ursine view. Nor should they solely take advice from the permabulls, who tend never to have seen a stock or stock market they didn't like.

Rather, investors should seek to aggregate well-thought-out and analytically based arguments from both sides of the pew and evaluate them objectively in order to form a more learned investment conclusion.

Doug Kass writes daily for RealMoney Silver, a premium service from TheStreet.com. For a free trial to RealMoney Silver and exclusive access to Mr. Kass' daily trading diary, click here.