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

Worsening weather patterns may provide investment opportunities By Stephen Leeb Ph.D. Mexico just dodged a bullet. Hurricane Patricia was the fastest forming, most intense hurricane ever seen in the Western Hemisphere, but in the end, mercifully, it caused relatively little damage. Apart from major flooding, it apparently… Read More

Stocks that will power the “Internet of things” By Stephen Leeb  In the 1980s a remarkably prescient researcher named Mark Weiser, who worked for a Xerox subsidiary and died in 1999, predicted that one day the world would see “ubiquitous computing”, whereby a multitude of objects would connect to one… Read More

Suncor avoids the pitfalls that will stymie the frackers By Stephen Leeb A seeming paradox is that while there’s a strong case for oil as a commodity, it doesn’t translate into a case for buying most oil-producing stocks. This starts to makes sense once you realize that rising oil… Read More

The iPhone will be critical to smart cities of the future By Stephen Leeb Last month (TCI October 2015) one of our P.3 Spotlight stocks was Apple (AAPL). We predicted it would rejoin Growth Portfolio in the not-too-distant future based on the iPhone’s almost guaranteed central role in the “Internet… Read More

Stocks set to thrive no matter what By Stephen Leeb Strong dependable growth. These words should be music to an investor’s ears at any time. But they strike an especially sweet chord in today’s cacophonous, uncertain environment. If you own companies certain to grow strongly whatever happens—whether the Fed acts… Read More

Growth will accelerate for Berkshire and Apple By Stephen Leeb This issue we’re spotlighting two stocks that didn’t make our p.2 table of sure-thing fast growers. That’s because rather than fast-paced growth, both currently offer a (still-tempting) combination of growth with safety. But if we were to reconstruct the… Read More

China’s military has made surprising gains By Stephen Leeb The world, unfortunately, presents all kinds of reasons why the U.S. can’t afford to be  complacent about its military capabilities. Decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Cold War’s end, Russia has been flexing its muscles in a… Read More

All four will gain from higher defense spending By Stephen Leeb If you don’t own at least one of the four major defense contractors listed on p.2, your outlook on the world may be far sunnier than ours. Not that there’s anything wrong with optimism. But in this case, it… Read More

Its new focus on cyber safety will propel growth By Stephen Leeb Our country’s defense—a critical area that we focus on in the preceding two articles—emphatically includes cyber security. That’s why this issue we’re selling technology stock Oracle from Growth Portfolio. Right now the company seems overly vulnerable to the… Read More

Profit From Defense By Stephen Leeb Ph.D. China is a big deal, as security-conscious investors and citizens must recognize. As we have written in various updates and in the forthcoming lead article in The Complete Investor, our sister publication, China threatens our security in almost every way. It concerns us… Read More