The best call financial writer Geoffrey Caveney ever made was in December 2015. Gold hit a multiyear low of $1,050 an ounce, and he was convinced that the metal had found a bottom. It was time to make a trade, he thought, not just in bullion but precious metal miners, specifically the juniors and some micro-cap names.

Readers who took Geoffrey’s recommendation were no doubt grateful they did. Responding to low to negative interest rates around the world, gold rose as much as 16.5 percent in the first quarter of 2016, its best three-month performance since 1986. By the end of June, it had surged 28 percent, its best first half of the year since 1974. Producers, as measured by the Philadelphia Gold and Silver Index, likewise took off.

Geoffrey’s track record is nothing to sneeze at. In July 2016 he advised readers to take profits on Alexco Resource, which was up an amazing 430 percent for the six-month period. A trade on Fortuna Silver Mines a month earlier netted him a 445 percent profit. He has a number of similar successes under his belt.

“I’m in the habit of thinking for myself,” he told me recently during a chat over the phone.

To make such a contrarian call on gold—or any other asset—you have to think for yourself. If you remember, gold in 2015 hadn’t logged a positive year in three years, and investor sentiment toward the precious metal was down. Every gold conference I spoke at, attendance was unusually light. When an asset gets this beat up, it’s often easy just to fall in with the herd.

But as Warren Buffett himself once said, “The time to get interested is when no one else is.”

Stay in Control of the Decision-Making Process

Thinking for himself has served Geoffrey well in a number of other ways—most notably when he got laid off during the financial crisis. Instead of wasting time looking for work that wasn’t available, he decided to try his luck at freelance tutoring. Combining his interests from when he attended Yale University in the 1990s, he began to teach young people chess, English, math and SAT prep.