5 Contrarian Investment Ideas

There's nothing better than being smarter than the market. Anyone who put cash to work in equities in early March, when stocks were notching a 12-year low, looks like a genius today. The contrarians on equities at the time -- those who were greedy for stocks when others were fearful of them -- have done very well for themselves. The Dow Jones Industrial Average and broader S&P 500 are up 25% and 30%, respectively, since that terrifying second week of March.

Make no mistake: Market timing is not an investing strategy (unless you have a crystal ball), but zigging when the rest of the world is zagging most certainly is. After all, the whole point of investing is to find assets that are mispriced -- to go against the grain of the market's conventional wisdom -- and profit from its miscalculations.

The rally in stocks appears to have petered out recently. And the corporate bond market looks ready to take a breather, too. Oil prices are tanking; the dollar is in the dumps (or as one investor put it to us, "cash is trash"); and interest rates are so low that savings accounts, CDs and money-market mutual funds can't generate anything but the most pitiful returns.

But it's at times like these, when nothing seems to be working, that contrarian ideas can be the best ideas. With that in mind SmartMoney surveyed market professionals to suss out their favorite out-of-favor ideas. Here, then, is a look at five contrarian picks for your portfolio.