The Globe and Mail attempts to identify Canadian stocks that have lost the favour of the herd in its Tuesday edition. The Globe's Tim Shufelt writes in the Number Cruncher column that there is research supporting the argument that investing in what analysts dislike can generate superior returns. The idea that the consensus is wrong informs contrarian investing, explains Mr. Shufelt. He first filtered for stocks listed in Toronto with a low average analyst rating. Mr. Shufelt avoided stocks overly influenced by too few analyst opinions. Mr. Shufelt also excluded the smallest stocks on the exchange, so market capitalization had to be at least $250-million. He also excluded the energy sector, which is beset by an overriding macro depressant (the plunge in oil prices), but is still looking expensive as a sector. So he avoided oil and gas entirely for this column. Finally, to help identify reasonably priced stocks, he capped the price-to-earnings ratio at 19 times, which is about the valuation on the S&P/TSX composite index. His ill-favoured stocks are AGF Management, Rogers Sugar, Laurentian Bank of Canada, Canaccord Genuity Group and Shaw Communications.