The New York Times' Floyd Norris spoke to fund manager David Dreman in the wake of fund trustees' decision (see The MFWire, 04/08/09) to drop him as manager of the $2.2 billion DWS Dreman High Return Equity Fund.

"The board of directors is obviously entitled to do what they did," the 72-year-old Dreman said in an article that appeared in the Times' print edition on Friday.

As for his contrarian style, Dreman said: "Low P/E has worked well over time. There will be years that we are very out of favor, but we make it up."

The DWS Dreman High Return Equity Fund posted a 47 percent loss in the past year, due in part to a bet on financial stocks.

"The E was much worse than anyone thought," Dreman said. "The banks themselves had no idea of how bad the E was."

In an interview with Bloomberg published Monday last week, Dreman said of his investing approach: "We are well known for this contrarian style and the fact that we do bounce back."

"This is probably the kind of market we will bounce back in," added Dreman, who penned the 1998 book, Contrarian Investment Strategies."

According to the Bloomberg article, Dreman put 27 percent of the fund in financial stocks as of August 30. The fund lagged the Standard & Poor's 500 Index in one- and three-year periods.

"We had seen very week performance for the fund over every major time horizon," David Wertheim, product manager for equities at DWS Investments, told Bloomberg.

Dreman will continue to manage two DWS funds. 

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