(meaning "rigorously just") in their reports? A typical Coxe missive is like a random walk through his fertile mind: history, politics, finance, science, investment theory. He is not afraid to use metaphor, humour or even poetry to make his sharp and often-cutting observations. Coxe has noted on more than one occasion that the Nasdaq Stock Market's headquarters in Times Square are on the site of a former porn shop, and "there is some question as to whether the ethical standards of that corner improved."

His unique style is a byproduct of his atypical path to the Street. He never went to business school. After graduating from high school in Newmarket, Ontario, he studied English, Latin and history at the University of Toronto, and later went into law. This led, oddly enough, to journalism and the National Review, the organ of American conservatism (the connections from which led, later on, to the dinner with Thatcher).

The intellectual challenge of journalism fit Coxe; the financial rewards, not so much. "It was a fabulous job to have, but we couldn't raise a family in New York on $9,000 a year." Coxe chose to return to Toronto with his family, where he pursued a legal career but without much enthusiasm. In the early 1970s, he landed at Mutual Life, writing speeches, among other duties. Before long, however, he had worked his way into its investment unit, and became known for dispensing his views in a colourful manner. During the inflation-wracked 1970s, he'd tell clients that the right amount of time to hold longterm bonds was "the amount of time you hold a hand grenade after you've pulled the pin." He joined Nesbitt Thomson, which later became BMO Nesbitt Burns, in 1992.

The historian in him never faded, and neither did the writer. When he wasn't penning his lengthy strategy reports (which he says he will still be writing bimonthly), he was pronouncing his views to a wider audience in The Globe and Mail, the National Post, Maclean's and elsewhere.

Like all strategists, Coxe got some predictions badly wrong. His bullish calls on gold in the early and mid-1990s were duds. For a time, he was an alarmist about the Y2K problem, writing: "Wouldn't it be fascinating if the once-in-a-millennium crisis came because creditors were unready for Y2K?" Other predictions he got dead-right. He warned at the end of 1997 that the Asian crisis was far from over, which it wasn't. He raised a skeptical eye at the absurd valuations on many technology companies in 1999 and 2000, and was right.

But it was his early, prescient call on commodities that cemented his reputation. Coxe says he turned bullish immediately after 9/11. He was pulling together a book titled The New Reality of Wall Street. The technology story was over; the media and telecom bubble had burst. In the late 1990s, America was coming down from the zenith of its economic power. Where would the action be? Coxe had noticed something about the world's two most populous countries, China and India. Changing times and, in India, changing governments had not budged either nation's commitment to joining the modern economic world. "This," says Coxe with typical flourish, "will be the greatest simultaneous efflorescence of personal economic liberty in human history."

What on earth does that mean? "I define that as people who move into dwellings with indoor plumbing, electricity, basic appliances, and [who] acquire personal motorized transportation. If you've got those things, you've got more personal freedom than 99% of the people who've ever lived." In other words, Coxe foresaw that the urbanization and accelerating industrialization of China and India would lift tens of millions to a better standard of living, which would increase their consumption on a massive scale.

More cars mean more oil and steel; new houses and apartments require copper and steel and cement; office buildings and factories use tonnes of metals of all types. In 2001, China's rapid growth was a known fact, but not yet widely discussed or debated in the North American press or on Wall Street. Thus it met one of the most important rules of Coxeism: "You should not invest in a story that's on page 1. Invest in the one that's on page 16 on its way to page 1."

By the middle of the decade, oil and mining bulls were as easy to find as believers in the so-called Chindia thesis. But Coxe took it further, calling for a huge spike in the value of grains and other food. Coxe's prediction of a farm boom offers insight into how his brain works. It was a conclusion he arrived at not by examining spreadsheets but through a mixture of personal observation and science. Coxe's father was born in a mission in India, and in early 2006, Coxe went back to retrace his ancestral roots. "I spent my time in the villages," he recalls, "and from that, I got the sense of the real revolution that was going on in India." Coxe saw first-hand that as poor Indians became more prosperous, they spent their extra income on, among other things, a better diet. "I came back and I said, 'The big commodity story now is going to be food and agriculture.' " By early 2008, with prices for most basic foodstuffs up sharply,

the words "food crisis" had moved their way from page 16 to page 1. And even though all of those commodities subsequently dropped, he is every bit as convinced he is still correct, because of the latest data on sunspots.

Yes, sunspots. A few words of explanation are required at this point. Coxe believes that theories of man-made global warming are, to be polite about it, a crock. The climate's natural swings are much greater than we think, and on this point, the man can cite trivia almost endlessly. (Coxe, a long-time friend says, has an eternal fascination with weather patterns.) "At the time of the Norman conquest in Britain [around 1066], the Vikings were growing grapes in Greenland," he says. Later, the Earth went through an extended cool period, so that by the late 1700s, "it's recorded that people went from Manhattan to Staten Island on horse and carriage" across the winter ice. Coxe believes the data show sunspot activity is responsible for these changes. And since sunspot activity has recently been lower than expected, Coxe thinks it's possible we'll soon be fretting about global cooling. Buy Monsanto. Buy other agriculture stocks. If you have the stomach to play the futures market, buy grain futures. "We're going to have probably the worst food crisis on record," Coxe says.

It is a fascinating theory-one that goes against the conventional thinking in scientific and political circles. But then, Coxe is full of fascinating theories. He is surely the only stock market guru in North America who can speak with authority about Galileo's early records of solar activity, or Mount Pinatubo's effect on the global temperature. One Canadian portfolio manager says that Coxe is a terrific lunch or dinner companion, a gentleman, and a skilled raconteur. This person loves meeting with Coxe whenever the two are in the same city.

But, adds the manager, "He drove people off a cliff here." There's no doubt: Investors who followed Coxe's advice made a lot of money for five or six years, but gave much of it back in the latter half of 2008. How did he fumble it? "What you had was the sharpest sustained drop in commodities in history, and we didn't have a global depression," says Coxe. Coxe says he underestimated the role of the hedge funds. He knew that many of them had gone long on commodities and short on financial stocks-that was rather obvious, and amplified the sharp rise in commodity prices in 2007 and the first half of 2008. What he didn't realize, or fully appreciate, was how many billions of dollars of those bets were made on borrowed money. Since commodities futures themselves are a leveraged investment, the result was a series of bets in which leverage was piled on top of leverage. The whole edifice came tumbling down during the summer, as hedge fund losses began to pile up and the margin calls came pouring in.

"None of us, or nobody I talked to, thought that much of it was hedge funds that were leveraged 30 or 40 or 50 to 1," says Coxe. Does he wish he'd figured it out? "You bet. But I don't know how I could have gotten that information." As for how the slide began, Coxe has become something of a conspiracy theorist. He believes that the Fed, with some help, engineered the commodity correction to try to bring hedge funds to their knees, forcing them to cover their short positions in financial shares and thus driving those shares up to the point where banks could raise new capital that they desperately needed. "Although it wiped out 40% of my net worth temporarily, I believe they did the right thing. In order to save the banking system, they had to kill the commodities."

The theory has a nice ring to it, and there may even be some truth to it, and yet it also seems a bit too convenient. (And if the point was to help the banks, it didn't work so well, judging by the seismic upheaval in the global banking system in September and October.)

The focus on the machinations of traders and fund managers glosses over another truth: Coxe and other oil bulls failed to foresee how quickly things would change on the ground. Take oil: At the start of last year, the International Energy Agency forecast that oil demand would grow by a brisk two million barrels a day. By December, the IEA said 2008 would be the first year since 1983 in which demand fell. Meanwhile, copper is piling up in warehouses at a level not seen in years.

"I don't know how you could miss that," says Paul Gardner, a portfolio manager at Avenue Investment Management in Toronto. He's a long-time Coxe fan, but is nonetheless perplexed by what he sees as a gap in logic exhibited by Coxe and such others as Eric Sprott: If you're bearish on the economy, how could you think that commodities will just keep going up? "You have to lose some of your shine because of that," says Gardner. "You're putting all your chips on China and India, and do you really trust the numbers there?" What Coxe trusts is his own eyes. He recently got back from another trip to India-in fact, he stayed at Mumbai's famous Taj Mahal Hotel, and departed just five days before terrorists attacked it in India's version of 9/11. While in the city, he visited Mumbai's central train station, to people-watch. "They look so much healthier than they did a few years ago," he says.

"I cannot give you qualitative data. I look at the people's bodies." He is as convinced as ever that China and India will be the world's great economic powers by the middle of this century, that the standard of living of their people will grow, and that the next great investment is food. "I haven't lost my enthusiasm for the belief that if there's a world tomorrow, it's going to be a world that needs more commodities, and that this still is the overarching theme of our time...the opportunities for investors are going to be really marvellous."

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