The story of Thomas Gebert

Introduction: Thomas Gebert is my first real stock market idol. Here I want to deal once with his philosophy and his history.

Main Part: Thomas Gebert, as a physicist, could get enthusiastic about the stock market mainly because it provides a pool of data to prove or disprove any economic thesis and at the same time it offers a way to make money. When Mr. Gebert read his first books about the stock market, he wondered whether the approaches and indicators discussed in the books were based on empiricism or on money-making. So he set to work and published 2 works at the end of the 90s: "Stock Market Cycles", in which he examines almost all time cycles relevant to the stock market through hard facts, and "Stock Market Indicators", in which he also presents his own strategy in addition to dealing with many stock market indicators. The Gebert strategy consists of 4 indicators, each of which is set to 1 or 0 on a monthly basis:

Interest rate indicator: Was the last ECB interest rate letter a cut?

Seasonal indicator: Are we between November and May?

Inflation indicator: Has inflation fallen on a 12-month view?

Currency indicator: Has the DM(Today EUR) depreciated against the USD?

At 3 or 4 positive indicators we are long DAX at 0 and 1nem invested in government bonds and at 2 we change nothing. With this system, which Gebert calls a kind of life's work, he has been able to beat the Dax since 1998. In doing so, the signals were published in Bulle & Bär magazine. In 2006, Merrill Lynch even issued a certificate to replicate the strategy. This was able to survive the financial crisis almost without damage. After the certificate was discontinued, Morgan Stanley issued a new one based on the strategy, which they were able to improve even further with a few optimizations. In 2010, Gebert put the Dax into a discounted cash flow model in the book "Why the Dax Rises to 10,000 Points" and was able to predict its course almost exactly. His observations related to the yield curve are also great reading. In mid-2016, he was not to be proven right with his bearish manifesto, "What to do when the time comes." Nevertheless, the 16-week strategy he presented and recommended in it was able to outperform the market, in terms of returns. At the end of 2019, Gebert then published the book "Kurzfriststrategien für Anleger" ("Short-term Strategies for Investors"), in which he describes typical behavioral patterns of investors, as he reveals in an interview, especially because of his now shorter time horizon, in line with the title, and shows how these can be exploited in the short term. In the meantime, Gebert has slipped somewhat due to his MMT theses, which he discusses in his new book "The Inflation Protection Advisor". Nevertheless, he is a great investor who is given far too little respect.

Conclusion: Everyone should have heard of Thomas Gebert once. The story of a genius who was able to beat the market for almost 25 years. What you draw from Gebert's methods you have to know yourself. I, for one, have built my investment philosophy on his foundation.