Prayer – Follow the Masters – Leave the Results to God

Jay O’Keefe is 81 years old. He managed the investment portfolio of Western National Life Insurance Company from 1960 to 1986, the year he left the corporate world. After that he began managing retirement money for himself and a few friends and family. By the late 1990s he began to realize that he did not have the wisdom, knowledge and expertise to excel, even though he had had years of experience and research. In 1999 he committed the entire project to God, took up a prayer vigil, and ask God to lead him to the experts whose knowledge, advice and counsel he should listen to in order to succeed. He further told his “clients” that if they had a bad year, he would discontinue the project. Jay believes the list that follows is the answer to his prayers. After forty years of seeking to learn to invest, he has found only a few people (18 in all) in whom he has any significant degree of confidence. Most of them follow the Austrian school of economics, which believes that governments should follow the same restraints as individuals in terms of balancing their budgets and using honest money (based on gold and silver.) They tend to major on fundamentals and minor on technical analysis. Here they are as of March 2011. (For a detailed explanation see Jay’s Letter 3 - Whom to Listen To.)

1. Ted Butler (over 60 years old).
2. Jim Rogers (approximately age 69) 
3. Richard Russell (87)
4. Jim Sinclair (around 70) 
5. Richard Maybury (over 60)
6. Chris Weber (over 50) 
7. Fred Hickey (over 50) 
8. Jason Hommel (over 40)

Jay calls his investment model the Prayer – Follow the Masters – Leave the Results to God Model. He follows the investing actions of Maybury and Rogers (and occasionally three or four others) to the extent he is able to find them out, which has been good, especially over the last ten years. Jay calls Maybury’s model the War - Politics - Invested Asset Model. Jay calls Rogers’ model the Counter-cyclical Long Wave in Stocks and Commodities Model. It could also be called the supply-demand cycle model. Jay has confidence in Rogers’ ability to select investments using his model. Both men have gotten outstanding results over the years, and both also contrarians. They move opposite to the crowd at the extremes of long moves, and with the crowds in the middle of long moves. (For a detailed explanation, see Jay’s Letter 33 - The Experts' Strategy Made Simple.)

Jay has written a book, Biblical Economics - what most Christians don't know the Bible teaches about economics, and he’s also published a number of letters and articles on the web site, http://somehelpful.info/Money. If you want to learn his philosophy in two hours, you can read the following seven letters:
 

1.   Getting Started

2.   The Permanent Portfolio

3.   Whom To Listen To

4.   Portfolio Allocation - Part 1

7.   Portfolio Allocation - Part 2

19. Uneasy About Jumping on the "Oil, Gold and Commodity Bandwagon?"

33. The Experts' Strategy Made Simple

Jay O’Keefe’s Current Portfolio
Jay is special in that he offers several investment strategies for his followers. One is to simply follow his own portfolio. Thus, he regularly publishes his portfolio online for free. If you want to follow Jay’s current portfolio, you can find it at http://somehelpful.info/Jay-portfolio.htm. You can also subscribe to receive his free e-mail updates (when he publishes a new article or letter or changes in his portfolio).