Guru Grades

Jim Puplava Erupts (Last Updated 8/22/09)

We evaluate here the market commentary of Jim Puplava at Financial Sense Online for February 2002 (the earliest available) through October 2005, at which point he stopped posting regular written commentaries archive. Jim Puplava is president of of Puplava Financial Services Inc., an investment advisory and money management firm, and Puplava Securities Inc., a broker-dealer. He is also the host of Financial Sense Newshour. The table below extracts highlights from his commentary and shows the performance of the S&P 500 index over the 5, 21, 63 and 254 trading days after the publication date for each item. Red plus (minus) signs to the right of specific items indicate those that the market has subsequently proven right (wrong). We conclude that:

• Jim Puplava has been generally very negative on the U.S. economy and U.S. equities over the period of evaluation. Following his advice, a prudent investor would probably have avoided most U.S. equities. See especially his market-bottom comments of 10/16/02 (another 4 to 9 years to reach bottom), 2/18/03 (the S&P 500 index should fall to 350) and 3/18/03 (warning of pending market implosion).
• He continually forecasts dire outcomes for the U.S. economy (such as stagflation and hyperinflation).
• In contrast, Jim Puplava has been generally positive regarding gold, commodities and energy throughout much of this period. Because the sample is small, we include forecasts these forecasts.
• Based on subsequent stock market performance and our judgments about his forecasts for overall stock market direction, Jim Puplava has been right 40% of the time, which is below average. His forecast sample size is modest, as is our confidence in this conclusion.
• As noted above, Jim Puplava has discontinued his regular written commentary, and we are designating this review as "dormant." We retain this record for historical reference as part of an overall analysis of guru accuracy.

In summary, Jim Puplava's accuracy in forecasting the overall direction of the U.S. stock market during 2002-2005 is below average. Confidence in this conclusion is modest.

See Guru Grades for a snapshot of the accuracy of various experts in predicting the direction of the U.S. stock market, including links to evaluations of the commentaries of other individual market pundits and gurus.