Harry Dent: Bold Predictions of the Great Depression Ahead

by Alexander Green, Chief Investment Strategist Monday, October 6, 2009: Issue #1108

As they said in the movie “Poltergeist”: “They’re baaa-aaack.”

Who’s back? Harry Dent, the self-styled “economic futurist,” who presumes to tell us about the great economic booms and busts that lie ahead.

How can he possibly know these things?

According to Dent, an analysis of the “highly predictable” nature of consumer spending based on demographic trends – increasing spending during child-rearing years, peak spending as the kids leave home and slower spending during late work and retirement – reveals what lies ahead for the economy and the stock market…

Harry Dent: Dow 44,000 & Other Flimsy Forecasts

Harry Dent is a man worth listening to. After all, he has a near perfect track record – as a contrary indicator…

For example:

MarketWatch columnist Chuck Jaffe highlights the new AdvisorShares Dent Tactical ETF (NYSEArca: DENT) as his "stupid investment of the week." Jaffe reviews portfolio manager Harry Dent's track record and finds it lacking.

Read the full column here.

In my father’s house are many mansions. Surely one of them has a room with no elephants in it….

Not to crunch too many metaphors right here at the top, but a consensus seems to be firming up in the animate jello of the Internet that we have entered the Season of the Witch. An odor of ripeness fills the virtual air — something between dead carp and apples baking.

Whatever else appears to be going on in the upper stories and verdigris-tinged turrets of capital finance — currency rackets, gold switcheroos, interest rate arbitrage games, concealment of losses under rugs and behind curtains, Chinese fire drills performed by Spanish prisoners, executive three-card-monte set-ups, boardroom work-arounds, accounting quicksteps, Peter-to-Paul-shuffles, check kitings, pigeon drops, Ponzi schemes, hugger-muggers, bezels, shucks, jives, and enough monkeyshines to make Lord Greystroke cry for mercy — apart, in other words, from business-as-usual, such as it is

The Harry Dent exchange-traded fund from AdvisorShares is overpriced and doesn’t fit into the way most investors use ETFs, Heather. It’s also one of the more interesting ETFs to come along in a while.

We’ve covered the debut of the Dent Tactical ETF (NYSEArca: DENT) closely on IndexUniverse.com. We wrote about the launch here, and ran an in-depth interview with Harry Dent, one of the fund’s portfolio managers, here.

The idea is simple: Two well-known market forecasters, Harry Dent Jr. and Rodney Johnson, will actively manage a portfolio by “identifying, through proprietary economic and demographic analysis, the overall trend of the U.S. and global economies and how consumer spending patterns may change based on this analysis.”

That sounds like a fairly normal active strategy. What makes DENT interesting is that the two managers will implement their strategy using ETFs. DENT, in other words, is an ETF-of-ETFs.

That’s interesting because it solves one

The author says forget about most of Europe and Japan. He also talks about his new ETF and the role of demographics in investing.

Harry Dent is founder and chief executive of Tampa, Fla.-based HS Dent Investment Management LLC. He is a best-selling author and money manager who has developed quantitative investment models based on demographic research.

He took time on Tuesday to discuss his latest views on the market with IndexUniverse.com Editor Murray Coleman. They also discussed Dent's new exchange-traded fund, the AdvisorShares Dent Tactical ETF (NYSEArca: DENT). It's scheduled to begin trading on Wednesday. Below are excerpts of that conversation.

IU.com: You’re fairly pessimistic about the market now, aren’t you?

Dent: We do think we’re at the end of this rally. This isn’t like past recessions. Consumer spending by baby boomers is peaking. It’s the end of a long surge that began in the 1980s. Clearly, baby boomers are