Quite the Contrarians

Everybody's a contrarian these days.

It was hard to find one back in 1999, the good old days of the New Economy. The term "contrarian investor" turned up just 42 times in Dow Jones Interactive articles that year. More people like the moniker now -- use of the term soared to 104 mentions in 2002. But this increasingly common usage threatens to make it as absurd a term as "alternative rock" was five years ago.

You can see why it's cool to be contrarian: Fund manager David Dreman tracked market opinions of experts going back to 1929, and found that the consensus was wrong 77% of the time. ...