Billionaires Soros, Paulsen, Robertson, Bass, Gross have company:

Bond Investor Gundlach Buys Hard Assets, Sees 'Kaboom' Ahead

By Seth Lubove & Alexis Leondis - Nov 30, 2012 12:00 AM ET

Bloomberg Markets Magazine

Joe Pugliese/Bloomberg Markets

Jeffrey Gundlach, who sees bleak financial times ahead, is the co-founder of DoubleLine Capital. He stands by a painting by Piet Mondrian, whose double-line style inspired the firm's name.

It’s mid-October, and Jeffrey Gundlach is giving a stump speech to a luncheon crowd of about 200 financial advisers and investors at Los Angeles’s City Club. The renowned money manager’s theme: the financial catastrophe on the horizon

In the ominous third phase, he predicts another crisis: Deeply indebted countries and companies, which Gundlach doesn’t name, will default sometime after 2013. Central banks may forestall these defaults by pumping even more money into the economy -- at the risk of higher inflation in coming years.
Gundlach, 53, doesn’t know when the third phase will get here, but he tells his audience they need to gradually get ready for it.
“I don’t believe you’re going to get some sort of an early warning,” Gundlach, who’s also chief investment officer at Los Angeles-based DoubleLine, tells his listeners. “You should be moving now.”

Gemstones, Art

He recommends buying hard assets: Gemstones, art and commercial real estate are high on his list. And DoubleLine has been buying the stocks of Chinese companies, U.S. natural gas producers and gold-mining firms because it considers them to be bargains.
Gundlach himself has amassed a contemporary art collection of about 100 pieces, with works by Jasper Johns and Franz Kline. The money manager drew on abstract painter Piet Mondrian’s double-line style for the name of his firm and its geometrical, crosshatched logo.


Gundlach, who correctly predicted the subprime mortgage disaster, has a proven record as a prognosticator -- and the performance numbers to go with it. At his former firm, TCW Group Inc., his Total Return Bond Fund earned an annual average of 7.9 percent in the decade ended in November 2009, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
His flagship $35.8 billion DoubleLine Total Return Bond Fund (DBLTX) gained an annual average of 13.2 percent from its inception in April 2010 through Nov. 28, topping the performance of Gundlach’s more famous neighbor to the south, Bill Gross (who's also recommending hard assets)