High Yield Reads - 7/19/14

Summary of recent stories of interest, sometimes enduring, to investors:

• Two good pieces in Barron's this week first up - Quite Contrary. I am always struck by virtually every fund manager and finance pro that I see interviewed characterizes themselves as "contrarian." Pretty sure for that to be valid the number needs to be below 50%. The Barron's story sums up today's conundrum well - "So when everyone appears to be a contrarian, what's a stockpicker to do? Perversely: Follow the consensus view"

• The Worst May Be Over at IBM - IBM is a company with great fundamentals, R&D, and best of all a fantastic score on Todd Wenning's Dividend Compass. its also a hated stock selling for less than 10 times earnings. Personally, I agree with Buffett and see a lot to like at IBM. They've been beaten up by the market due to Cloud and Mobile trends, but that's missed a lot of their pluses (which I will cover in a future post). On top of that, this week the Apple-IBM partnership puts IBM in a great position, best in class back end (Websphere, Mainframe) for the best in class front end (Apple). Smart deal right out of Ricardo

• A Wealth of Common Sense - A Portfolio Premortem, this is one of my favorite concepts, writing down how to deal with adverse events. Its related to the Investment Policy Statement that Jason Zweig wrote about in Your Money and Your Brain.

• Forever Investor has a review of Joel Greenblatt's Little Book that Beats the Market. That along with his first book "You Too Can Be A Stock Market Genius" are two of my all time favorites. He does an excellent job at distilling concepts down in a way they can be applied by a wide array of investors

• Morgan Housel "I Prefer to Keep Things Simple" drills down on how boring Consumer Staples outperform exciting Tech. 

• Foolgirl "Invest Like a Girl, an American Girl" Barbie on decline, but American Girl isn't Mattel looks cheap, and their dividend continues to grow

• My new posts this week - argue that Unilever and Kimberly-Clark are better bargains than Colgate, Statistically Cheap Stocks Can Be Expensive, and Cracker Barrel's dividend growth may be leveling off.