Stephen Leeb

Stephen Leeb, Ph.D. is the Chief Investment Strategist of The Complete Investor and Real World Investing.

Dr. Leeb’s books have been notable for predicting the secular bull market that started in the 1980s (Getting in on the Ground Floor, Putnam, 1986); the tech stock crash and rise of real assets, including oil and gold (Defying the Market: Profiting in the Turbulent Post-Technology Market Boom, McGraw-Hill, 1999); and the surge in oil prices (The Oil Factor: Protect Yourself and Profit from the Coming Energy Crisis, Warner Books, 2004). His national bestseller, The Coming Economic Collapse: How You Can Thrive When Oil Costs $200 a Barrel (Warner Books, 2006), co-authored with Glen Strathy, outlined the biggest challenges facing the US economy, and accurately predicted the 2008 sub prime mortgage crisis as well as the vicious subsequent economic cycle requiring massive infusions of government stimulus, near zero interest rates and much higher federal debt levels. Game Over: How You Can Prosper in a Shattered Economy (Business Plus, 2009) predicted a permanent peak in global commodity production. Dr. Leeb’s eighth and latest book, Red Alert (Hachette, 2011), outlined China’s growing prosperity and the ways in which its demands on increasingly scarce resources threaten the American way of life.

Among his many speaking engagements, he has been the keynote speaker at both a JPMorgan Chase energy conference and a Royal Bank of Canada commodities conference.

Dr. Leeb received his bachelor’s degree in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. He then earned his master’s degree in Mathematics and Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Illinois in just three years, an academic record that stands to date. He is frequently quoted in the financial media, including Investors Business Daily, USA Today, Business Week, The New York Times, NPR and The Wall Street Journal. In addition, Dr. Leeb is a regular guest on Fox News, Bloomberg, CNN and Neil Cavuto.

Analyst Articles

A strong sector gives the economy shelter By Stephen Leeb Probably the key lesson from the 2008 housing crash and the housing market’s glacially slow recovery is don’t mess with housing. Sure, you can point out, like Michael Lewis in The Big Short, that regulations were lax and greed allowed… Read More

One-stop shopping in the hinterlands By Stephen Leeb To invest in a strong housing sector (p.1),  Home Depot, the country’s leading home products retailer, with industry-high margins, might seem the obvious choice. And it’s an excellent company. But we think we’ve found an even better one, one specializing in rural… Read More

Dollar Tree offers savings on everyday items By Stephen Leeb Tractor Supply (TSCO), a home-related retailer dominant in U.S. rural markets and featured this month as our p.3 Spotlight stock, is one of two retail stocks joining Growth Portfolio this issue. The other is Dollar Tree (DLTR), which replaces a… Read More

Leaders in getting resources to stretch further By Stephen Leeb No one can predict the future with certainty. But as the brilliant economist/philosopher E.F. Schumacher argued more than 40 years ago, what you can do is trace out the logical implications of various possible futures. Schumacher himself presciently focused on… Read More

Aggressive ways to play a rise in gold and other metals By Stephen Leeb Our small-cap mining stocks are starting to perk up, justifying our belief in them, which is firmly rooted in our conviction that gold and other metals will be embarking upon long-term uptrends. Below we review… Read More

Energy Wasted to Get More Energy By Stephen Leeb Ph.D. Mark Jacobson, a Stanford University professor and obviously a very smart man, has sung his tune for some time now. An environmental economist, or more precisely, a Civil and Environmental Engineer, he long before anyone else regularly… Read More

Because the future doesn’t just happen By Stephen Leeb When John Maynard Keynes said, “in the long run we are all dead”, he wasn’t telling people to go out and party. Rather, he was saying that economies don’t automatically recover stability—policymakers need to make the right decisions to steer them… Read More

Superior cyber security and a long-term focus By Stephen Leeb Cyber security, an ever more vital concern in the U.S. and many other places, inherently requires the kind of long-term perspective we praise in our front page article. That might explain why the best cyber security companies have roots… Read More