ologhai

By the way, is the implication of this chart that, on average, the price of gold has risen at around 9% per year for the last 40 years?

I thought it might be useful to be able to see the 'wrap around' of the first six months copied onto the end of the year. So, just in case anyone else will find it useful: If one were a trader, this 'wrap around' makes it particularly clear that on average, one should stock up in August and sell up at the end of February (the change in price between the end of Feb and Aug is rather dwarfed by what had been the 'usual' growth from Aug to Feb).

Why would that be? I would've thought that most reputable lenders would take the word (albeit written) from an accountant about the state of the self-employed person's income/profit.

My guess would be that the text of the blog is composed in some separate editing tool (not directly on the blogging website), then copy-and-pasted into a text-editing box on the blogging website in order to publish it... and somewhere between one and the other, 'soft' linebreaks (i.e. word-wrap linebreaks generated by the editing tool because of its window width) are being converted to 'hard' linebreaks. The explanation needn't be exactly this, but it has the feeling of being something along these lines, especially as the erroneous linebreaks occur after roughly the same number of characters: they don't have the appearance of being randomly placed. Or perhaps, as DrBubb suggests, he's a nutter. You choose which explanation you prefer...

Perhaps a central issue here is that the kind of people who have bought physical (even at a distance) over recent years are precisely the kind of folks who like things kept simple. They have (I suspect) mostly bought gold to remove many of the question marks associated with other investments, and to try to get out of the way of those who can mess with their money. It feels as if we're still well in advance of any gold mania (whether or not one is to come), so gold buyers thus far are probably more suspicious and more cautious people than most. For gold buyers, change is something to be wary of. BV's apparent simplicity (and being relatively question-mark free) might explain why it's done pretty well, and (sadly, from the point of view of at least some customers) become interesting to other parties. I hope that those still in majority control of BV remind any such interested parties that they became interested in BV because of what BV already is. I would suggest the possibility that trying to 'improve' what BV is might not work out as intended.

Why do you think showing this chart will help renters? Doesn't it just show that rents haven't changed really over the last couple of years (at least nominally)?

Thanks for your thoughts! While I'm typing a reply -- if George Osborne announces an increase in the CGT rate (and perhaps a reduction in the allowance), will the PoG plummet tomorrow? Any thoughts, folks?

What's the thinking behind this?

I struggle to lift my largest suitcase when it's just full of clothes and stuff! And, unless you have especially strong joists up in your attic, it wouldn't be long before the suitcase would end up in your cellar without you having to lift a finger!

I was just reading a short piece about Brazil in MoneyWeek. "Brazil 'won't be immune'," it says, "to a renewed slide in global growth, says Morgan Stanley. That would be bad news for commodities, which are also threatened by a Chinese slowdown." Further, in an item about copper: "Then there's China, the biggest user of [copper]. Demand will soften as the government keep trying to reign in growth." Is there a general downward trend in commodity prices incoming, and what do folks imagine the effect on silver will be?

BV's gold chart doesn't seem to have 'woken up' since the weekend. Is anyone else seeing this, or is it just me?

I suppose the opposite of a smackdown is a... smackup?

Or, just for the fun of the analysis: 2. Gold is money, so it can only be 'priced' in terms of everything else? Maybe.

Or, just for the fun of the analysis: 2. Gold is money, so it can only be 'priced' in terms of everything else? Maybe.

Another way of trying to measure the peakiness and troughiness of gold occurred to me yesterday. I thought it might be interesting to plot the increase in the price of gold as steady growth over the top of its actual price movements. Assuming that this has any validity at all, then peakiness could be seen by most/all of the price of gold plot being below the steady growth plot, and the other way around for troughiness. In retrospect, I'm not sure this approach really adds much information that the idea of plotting the ratio of the price of gold over the 200 DMA, but I thought it might be worth a try. Here is a chart of the PoG from the start of 2007 to yesterday (blue), with steady growth (red), 200 DMA (green) and the PoG/200 DMA ratio (white): As you can see from the chart, if my interpretation of the steady growth line (as explained above) is true, there is still some addition upside yet to come as the steady growth line comes in below the three previous extremes of peakiness. I would be interested to hear any comments, particularly on whether plotting this actually adds any information (or even a perspective) on the movements of the PoG.