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electroweak

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  1. hmm.. difficult one! - In general, I think so. Obviously, by all means, keep a year or so's worth of ready cash on hand. But as for amounts of the order you might spend in a 4-5 year timeframe, personally, I would rather buy a cheap asset. Some BDI? Some Oil leaps? Maybe. I am attracted to PM's still, because they are now cheaper, the fundamentals are, to me, quite good and they are "out of the system". We all know governments and the authorities means-test almost everything, and that will get worse as they get more desperate. Just my random thoughts!
  2. just one later thought - we are now transitioning into a truly negative interest rate environment, and i mean nominally negative, not just negative 'real' IR's. Today I read that, for the first time ever recorded, some corporate bonds (Nestle) hit a negative yield! This negative nominal rate at some point will trigger the pass-the-parcel money bomb! In this negative-gravity world, it pays to be a borrower. Pass-the-parcel, because if you are a retail bank caught with an overnight surplus deposit at the Central Bank, you are charged for it. So there is an incentive to make sure you don't get stuck with the money overnight. In Denmark I read that there now exists a real retail mortgage which pays you to borrow. Think about that; that in itself should get the money velocity going! I think the CB's should be very worried about these developments. I think they are terrified! And that is why I believe they (the CB's) are talking about raising rates. They know however that this is a last resort and if they do raise rates, it will be by a tiny amount to act as a warning. Any significant rate rises will make the national debts and in particular the national deficits absolutely unmanageable. The printing will have to restart to cover the interest payments. I think i've had too much wine. My brain's jumping around too much!
  3. ​ ​ Cheers! - feel free to chip in :-P ​ ​ ​mm. not really, if i had waited in yen, euros or roubles. I do admit though it would have got me more gold to wait in GBP or USD (30% more?) but I had 'insurance' during that period. ok. ​ I don't believe there is much of gold's monetary value priced in yet at all; in fact if you believe there is any monetary value in gold (or likely to be in the future), then it looks like an incredible bargain. I believe it is behaving as a commodity with a very high stock-to-flow, and not much is for sale (i.e. Russia could theoretically buy the entire US gold stock with it's $350Bn of reserves, but it's not for sale) ​ ​ I am ambivolent, but i would tend toward believing there is some manipulation since the widespread use of Gold futures took root. Much of the money 'in gold' really resides in no such asset, just something which pays out the difference in gold's commodity value over time (during times of monetary normality). The insurance value of these paper assets is essentially zero to me, so I view them as absorbing what would otherwise be money destined for the real asset. Anothe reason to think that the price of gold could go up if money were to actually buy gold instead of paper going forward. Have we reached 'peak paper gold'? ​ hmm.. again, to me the fact is that we haven't seen much price inflation yet; though the money has been created and not lent (see M2 Money Velocity at multi-decade lows, and monetary base quintupled since 2008). This money needs to be removed from the system before it heats up. That would entail the Fed / BoE etc. selling bonds into a rising-rate environment, or maybe holding them to maturity if they can get away with it for that long. ​ ​
  4. I'ii come clean and tell you that I don't think I personally made a mistake with silver, but I did swap it for gold at $49.20 in 2011, which you might consider a mistake, but I do not. My swap bought me three times more gold than I would have otherwise obtained, if I had just bought gold with the cash instead of silver first. The trick there imo was to buy something which screamed good value (silver), and bail out when the profits were good enough (3x in as many years). As to my "mistake" with gold, well .... gold is at it's 2011 highs in Yen and Euros. It's also at new highs in Rubles. If you're Greek, you dont regret buying in 2011. There but for the grace of god goes the UK. The GBP 'profit' on gold has not yet been good enough for me to consider swapping out of it. I think there's a blow-off coming, some massive catastrophe as the Central Banks are forced to let go of an unsustainable position (somewhat like the SNB was forced to let go, but for reasons of poor fiscal management, ultimate erosion of the USD as reserve currency [reversing this little uptrend weve seen]) Now, as for manipulation - what we have seen over the last 2 years in gold, I believe *is* largely manipulation. Something is brewing, and it involves China and Russia. Indian authorities have clearly particpated in that manipulation (either wittingly or unwittingly), at the expense of their people. Now, I don't know if we had the Fed, the BoE or the SNB doing it, the Obama-bankster meeting the day before gold was slaughtered seems like a clue to me. Gold behaved for 2 years like 'the red headed step-child'. It got beat for anything and everything. There has clearly been stress in the physical market - because I personally have seen arbitrage opportunities between futures and spot gold which made $1/Oz for not holding gold. Stress in the physical market comes from entities demanding delivery. Futures prices can be whacked on margin. There is your manipulation! - physical delivery on the cheap. In December 2014, something changed. Gold began to rise with the USD rising. The futures whacking slowed and is now more occasional (perhaps that's healthy speculation). India is now easing its tax and import/export regulations, so they are coming back to the market. China is apparently guzzling gold at a rate of 200 tonnes / month through Shanghai Gold Exchange. My view: let's see whare this takes us. I'm not selling/swapping out until at least 100 Oz buys an average UK house (if that exists!). (I already own my home, but I'm use the average home as a measure of value to help me decide when to swap) As to what to swap to? - my ideal would be a mix of bonds and equities; whichever seems good value. BUT the distortions in both those markets are so extreme at the moment it will be fun to see how that plays out from the sidelines. I aim to buy either bonds or equities when the blood is on the streets for those markets. Gold will have its day. Silver too, likely.
  5. AFAIK, much of their mining operations are in Russia... does the political risk bother you, or have you worked out why it is irrelevant? Not to put the cat among the pigeons, but what if Putin decided to nationalise gold output? I like the MASSIVE yield, though!!!! EPS 17p, share price 42p.
  6. I'm feeling that the US economy is gubbed; whilst on the surface jobs numbers look great, underneath it's a whole different story with part-time replacing full-time, people dropping out of workforce etc. Gold is pricing in a "no QE" strategy, whilst stocks are pricing in a "no Interest Rate hike" future. Personally, I think the wheels will come off big time soon and we'll be in an almost uncontrollable deflation. That's when Gold will react because the Central Bankers will be forced to un-taper, or launch the money-ICBMs or whatever.
  7. To me, it's an obvious banker-sponsored puff piece: hmm.. yes, well, after the next lurch in the financial crisis we may remember what deposit risk is.
  8. Good to see you, GF. Yes, the wait has been long! How about refreshing some of those colour-coded G:S and G:DJIA scatter plots, to see how the (in my view secular) bear impacted them?? Reviewing the last 18 months, I personally wish the Indian Gov. had been forced to lower the draconian duties they imposed last year. I also wish Comex had exploded earlier this year as inventories dropped precipitously. (I now suspect Comex will simply be side-stepped by SGE and the other exchanges.)
  9. But I think they DID write about the upward spikes; it was the eruption of the Quingdao port probe into missing collateral... ? which they argued , along with Goldman as i recall, would be ultra-positive for gold. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-06-05/chinas-missing-commodity-scandal-spreads-banks-fear-fallout-rehypothecated-funding-d Also there is usually some news around an upward spike.. like: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-06-05/ukraine-closes-8-border-crossings-reports-russian-troop-movement Or, maybe it was -ve deposit rates at the ECB... http://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/pr/date/2014/html/pr140605_3.en.html which ZH did cover.. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-06-05/have-questions-about-ecbs-unprecedented-negative-deposit-rate-call-guy Anyway, it seems there is never any explanation for the sharp *downward* moves at odd times of the day or night.
  10. Thanks for that. I like your logical explanation. Perhaps Britannias are indeed a better buy; but I already have lots of them! I like the controversial aspect the £20 coins throw up because it gets people to think about what money is, and even that a pound used to be a (troy) pound of silver! I guess it's an insured call. You can obviously do better if there is a moonshot, but I keep them around instead of £20 notes as SHTF money. The thing about silver, I guess, is that a lot (most?) of it is mined as a by-product of other metals. Logically that means production is less sensitive to the silver price than one would first expect. Also there is a fair bit of silver above ground in teasets and trays etc. so I believe there is quite a high stock-to-flow ratio --what I mean to say there is that there is a lot of silver which would "come out of the woodwork" if there was a moonshot. I do fully expect there to be a silver moonshot at some point; but I sold 66% of my holding actually at $49.20, keeping only the phys. I'm letting that 'ride', hoping for $150+.
  11. ok, the coins are spendable for £20. (Britannias are just £2, despite having more silver). The silver is just a 'free extra', so you have effectively got a free 'call option' on some silver. Yes, you get less silver than a Britannia, but you can spend the coins for £20. You can't do that with a Britannia. If silver does a moonshot, you got the silver for free; as it's the same as holding a £20 note without the silver.
  12. Oh, that was magic.. thanks so much for posting those. If the manager/staff had any nouse, they'd take them and flog them on ebay lol. (I understand they go for about 25 quid or sometimes more) bst bits for me: 1st video, manager keeps thinking they are £2 coins.. 1st video @9m57 Aza:"what are they made out of?" - Mgr:"dunno - silvery copper inside." Aza:"nope.. pure silver.." Stunned silence. Doesn't know what .999 silver looks/feels like. 2nd video, 23s Female Tesco employee:"The actual cash value is £7 something.." LOL! "Priceless".
  13. $10 of that drop happened in ONE (1) second at 07:19 this morning (BST)
  14. my god, it's a small world. Sometimes, when i'm on a plane i look out the window at all the cities below and wonder how many people down there own silver or gold in any significant amounts; more than their wedding ring and a few necklaces... I think my estimate just went down. Good for you, Aza... I might try spending mine. Course, you have to have them by the short and curlies (i.e. the fuel in your tank) before they take it seriously. In a shop they would just say no. You got it in for Tesco, or just the manager btw?
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