The wind was building well before the forecasters caught up. By the time the warnings reached the marinas, the most seasoned skippers were already reefed down and pointed into it — not away. That instinct, to lean toward the weather rather than run from it, is the through-line of every contrarian investor we spoke to over six weeks of conversations.
It is an unfashionable posture. The index has climbed a wall of worry for two years, and the crowd has been rewarded for buying every dip. But beneath a placid headline number, the dispersion is violent — and a small group of Australia's most respected managers believe the next twelve months will separate the lucky from the deliberate.
"Many shall be restored that now are fallen," Steve Johnson likes to quote, "and many shall fall that now are in honour." He is paraphrasing Horace by way of Benjamin Graham, and he means it literally: the leadership of the last cycle is rarely the leadership of the next.
"The market is paying a fortune for certainty. We're being paid to take the other side."
— A LIVEWIRE-INTERVIEWED CIO, MARCH 2026
That willingness to be early — and therefore, for a time, wrong — is the price of admission. Each manager framed it differently, but the shape was the same: concentrate where conviction is highest, size positions to survive the drawdown, and let time do the compounding the crowd is too impatient to wait for.
Three places the deliberate are looking
The first is the unglamorous middle of the ASX — quality industrials that pulled back hard and now trade at multiples that assume permanent stagnation. The second is global tourism, where international arrivals have recovered to 97% of pre-pandemic levels while valuations languish. The third is the most contrarian of all: Australian technology, recently de-rated and largely left for dead.
None of them pretend to know when the weather turns. What they share is a refusal to be positioned for only one outcome — and a conviction that the portfolios built in the calm are the ones that survive the gale.
"You don't get to choose the conditions," one manager told us as our conversation wrapped. "You only get to choose how you're rigged when they arrive."
Managing Editor at Livewire Markets. Writes long-form features on markets, managers and the people behind the money.
