Not too many people pay attention to contrarians. They often remind me of the kids in school who ate paste. Sitting in a corner by themselves, ostrasized by their peers. Loners. What you forget is that these kids are often the ones who grow up to do great things. Their minds are complex and cavernous, sparkling with nuggets of information that every investor should pay attention to.

Contrarians are not the ones shouting from atop desks, playing silly sounds and acting like crazed lunatics when discussing the stock of the day. In fact, one could argue that a contrarian is the exact opposite of Jim Cramer.

That shouldn’t really surprise anyone. After all, Jim Cramer is the most popular investment personality on the most popular investment television station. A contrarian prefers to act in the opposite from the conventional norm, and as weird as it sounds, Mr. Cramer is as norm as you get.

I myself have fallen victim to the same trap of ignoring the contrarian. A perfect example of this was my recent discovery of iTulp.com, a website dedicated to the contrarian view of investing. This website has been around since 1998, an eternity by web standards. It has been written up by very credible news agencies, varying from Barron’s to CNBC. Impressive. I am, however, not alone in my ignorance in knowledge of this website. Alexa ranks iTulip outside its top 100,000 sites. I have seen many sites in existence for less than a year easily crack the top 100k.  Therefore, many people appear to be ignoring the Contrarian, hence my post.

Perhaps the most famous, if not the simplest contrarian strategy is the Dogs of the Dow. It is also the first investing strategy that I read about, so I will always hold a special place for it. The premise couldn’t be simpler. At the end of the calendar year purchase equal dollar amounts of the 10 Dow Industrial Average stocks that have the highest dividend yield (the dogs). Hold for a full year and re-balance annually. The theory is that your returns will outperform the full 30 stock Dow Index. It didn’t work the year I tried (on paper).

Even though my first experience with contrarian strategy was a failure, I still believe in reading up on what contrairans are currently talking about. They are often very smart people who make astute arguments on where the market has been, currently is, and will be heading. I encourage you all to do a bit of research and study this methodology. You might not agree with their outcomes, but there are definitely some nuggets of knowledge that will benefit you in future investments.