Kass: 15 Surprises for 2011

This blog post originally appeared on RealMoney Silver on Dec. 27 at 10:28 a.m. EST.

"Never make predictions, especially about the future."

-- Casey Stengel

There are five lessons I have learned since my first surprise list for 2003:

1. how wrong conventional wisdom can be;
2. that uncertainty will persist;
3. to expect the unexpected;
4. that the occurrence of Black Swan events are growing in frequency; and
5. with rapidly changing conditions, investors can't change the direction of the wind, but we can adjust our sails (and our portfolios) in an attempt to reach our destination of good investment returns.

Eight years ago, I set out and prepared a list of possible surprises for the coming year, taking a page out of the estimable Byron Wien's playbook, who originally delivered his list while chief investment strategist at Morgan Stanley, then Pequot Capital Management and now at Blackstone. (Here was Byron Wien's surprise list for 2010.)

Importantly, my surprises are not intended to be predictions but rather events that have a reasonable chance of occurring despite being at odds with the consensus.

I call these "possible improbable" events. In sports, betting my surprises would be called an "overlay," a term commonly used when the odds on a proposition are in favor of the bettor rather than the house.

The real purpose of this endeavor is to consider positioning a portion of my portfolio in accordance with outlier events, with the potential for large payoffs.

Since the mid-1990s, the quality of Wall Street research has deteriorated in quantity and quality (due to competition for human capital at hedge funds, brokerage industry consolidation and former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer-initiated reforms) and remains, more than ever, maintenance-oriented, conventional and groupthink (or groupstink, as I prefer to call it). Mainstream and consensus expectations are just that, and in most cases, they are deeply imbedded into today's stock prices.

It has been said that if life were predictable, it would cease to be life, so if I succeed in making you think (and possibly position) for outlier events, then my endeavor has been worthwhile. My annual exercise recognizes that over the course of time, conventional wisdom is often wrong. As a society (and as investors), we are consistently bamboozled by appearance and consensus.

Too often we are played as suckers as we just accept the trend, momentum and/or the superficial as certain truth without a shred of criticism. Just look at those who bought into the success of Enron, Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, the heroic home run production of steroid-laced Major League Baseball players Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire, the financial supermarket concept at what was once the largest money center bank (Citigroup (C)), the uninterrupted profit growth at Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac (FRE), housing's new paradigm of noncyclical growth and ever-rising home prices, the uncompromising principles of Spitzer, the morality of other politicians (e.g., John Edwards, John Ensign and Larry Craig), the consistency of Bernie Madoff's investment returns (and those of other hucksters) and the clean-cut image of Tiger Woods.

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