ologhai

Looking at BV's chart, it looks like POG in sterling hit £699.50 in the last ten minutes... Now around £699.00... Is this being reported on BBC News 24 etc.? Feels like it ought to be! EDIT: Looks like it just crossed over the £700 line! (And back! )

That's okay. Forums aren't always the easiest means of communication, and it just doesn't seem worth messing up this nice thread any further! It's kind of one of those 'over a couple of beers' types of philosophical discussion, but I don't see any beers, so I thought it best to let it go!

Yep, somehow I knew you'd miss the point completely! Never mind. You know what you mean, and I know what I mean, and that will have to do...

I did notice that, but 'favourite' is a subjective criterion -- you buy a favourite drink because it's nice to drink in your opinion. If you decide it's nice, no one can take that away from you, and all other considerations are pretty much irrelevant. I assume you wouldn't want the criterion for buying gold to be just that subjectively you happen to think it looks nice and shiny, though! If you're going to decide to be long on gold today whether the price goes up, down or stays the same, then that means today's price isn't relevant to your decision... so there's not much point in even making reference to the price today... P.S. That doesn't mean that I'm not mesmerised by the POG just now, like most other people on this forum at the moment I would imagine!

This is nothing to do with whether I think gold is going up or down in the near, medium or long-term, but... that seems a bad analogy to me. Something getting cheaper isn't necessarily a reason for stocking up on it -- take sterling for example...

Do you have shares in a candle company or something? You're forever lighting 'em!

Here's my latest work of pure imagination... I call it Predicting the Peak! Like many artists, I'm hoping not to have to die before it becomes worth something!

I feel a bit conflicted. I think the difficulty this time around is the disconnect between gold valued in dollars and gold valued in just about everything else. When all currencies were more or less synchronised, it was possible to look at a price-of-gold chart (in whatever currency) and think 'it's due a pull-back,' or 'it's got some legs yet'... or whatever, and there was a sense that it was a judgement about gold itself that one was making. Now, with the dollar chart looking so much different than, say, the sterling chart, one chart can look like gold still has legs, while the other makes it look like gold could be due a pull-back. So... looking at the gold-in-dollars chart, I can see what you're saying. I imagine there'll be a tussle around the $1k threshold, but maybe there'll be no noticeable pull-back. However, on the sterling chart, it does still feel a bit as if gold's been a little excitable lately, and that perhaps (at least in saner times), it might just pull back a bit and consolidate for a little while. With two different-looking charts, it's easy to come to two separate conclusions. If chartism is worth anything, shouldn't that be the case? Although it's hard to imagine that price of gold in dollars would rise without taking gold in sterling along with it!

Pull-back postponed? Market Watch: BOE set to unleash quantitative easing.

If he really did say 'speculative', that's quite a Freudian slip!

MoneyWeek's Money Morning, 18-Feb-09... I'll take that as a 'yes'!

"[Phil Spencer] said: 'The correction in the housing market continues to unfold with unprecedented speed. Nobody can know how long this is all going to take to turn around and we should be highly speculative of anyone who claims to be able to do so.'" Highly speculative? What does that mean? How can you be highly speculative of someone?

Is anyone else feeling that we're overdue a bit of a pull-back/consolidation? Perhaps if I were a little more trading-minded, I might be thinking about selling a little in the expectation of being able to buy more gold with the money in the near future.

If the UK does 'go the same way as Iceland', what will be the effect on people's everyday lives in Britain? The value of sterling will drop dramatically compared with other currencies, right? If Britain exported anything, it would therefore be cheap in other countries. Anything we import (i.e. everything) will become more expensive... So, prices will go up dramatically in the UK? Am I right so far? What else might happen? Any thoughts received with interest (no pun )...

Whew! That's a bit overwhelming... He mentions gold being valued at $10k as a minimum, but if there are $10 to one new dollar, what's been achieved? My head's spinning. Can someone translate this article a little bit for the thick ones at the back?

Perhaps I misunderstand where you're coming from, but this kind of reasoning puzzles me. Isn't gold 'the' safe haven because of its price (present and future)? Isn't its relative stability in value (which would be shown, for example, by its strengthening exchange rate against other weakening currencies, i.e. its increasing 'price') precisely why the price isn't meaningless? I imagine assertions like 'ignore the price; it's meaningless' are why non-goldbugs think that goldbugs might be a tad less objective about gold that they should be... It almost sounds like you're saying 'the price is unimportant -- just look how lovely and shiny it is!'

Right. So all of the old monthly gold threads are in Main Discussion, but they just sink because no one posts to them. I don't really know what I thought was happening to them (not that I lost any sleep ), but I kind of thought that perhaps they were moved to the Mining and Precious Metals forum or something... Or maybe that they were chiselled into tablets of stone so that, in future aeons, they could form the basis of a world religion, and a new branch of study (called Thauology or something) could spring up to discuss and argue the finer interpretation of what the Profits Hath Said in The Gold One... erg... *takes special medicine* I'm fine now.

I'm curious to know what the procedure is with the old threads. Are they just unpinned, but remain in Main Discussion to sink over time?

I'm just watching a video that Steve N posted on the Chris Martenson thread and noticed on their oil price chart (around 3:40 into the video) that there was a huge oil price spike -- over $94 a barrel -- at around the same time as the 1980 gold price peak. I imagine this isn't news to anyone else, but I've not really seen any historic oil price charts before so it rather jumped out at me. Are the reasons for those dual peaks independent phenomena, or are they linked either directly or because they occurred as a result of underlying economic reasons? The medium to long term price expectation of oil from today is presumably that it will rise dramatically, purely for supply and demand reasons as Peak Oil is alleged to be around nowish. Again, if gold is to rise also in the medium to long term, will it do so independently of oil, or because of some link? As a related question, for those who consider gold to be a fairly sure-fire investment (or insurance), is oil equally sure (or even more likely) to rise? Considering the price of oil right now, isn't it a good time to put some money that way?

Assuming a parallel between the peaks in May '06 and Mar '08, then why are we not just expecting another, say, eight months of little more than consolidation (however volatile) before we see any more decisive moves?

In trying to imagine how heavy gold is, I find it useful to start with something I know. Imagine filling a bucket to the brim with water. Imagine how heavy that would feel. Okay, it's not especially heavy, but it's still a pretty cumbersome and unwieldy thing to lug around. Gold is over 19 times heavier than water. Imagine a container the size of a bucket that weighs nearly twenty times more than a bucket full of water... In terms of getting an inkling of how heavy gold is, that pretty much does it for me!

If the supply of silver is low (due to the 'mainly a by-product' factette), then if/when people finally remember it is a currency... (it is left as an exercise to the reader to complete this sentence! )

The price of gold in GBP (at least on BV's chart) is wild! As the price in USD has been sliding down this morning, GBP is zig-zagging -- so far, with the peaks and troughs getting increasingly extreme. It looks like there's a fight going on! Or BV's charts are bugged...

That sounds like fun, and was sort of what I was imagining doing myself. (You may recall a couple of my posts in this thread a week or two ago about trading gold -- the 'I've just put £1500 into BV to play with' posts, if you recall.) I do keep an eye on British Bulls myself (although fairly sporadically), and I too have the sense that it's too slow to respond. Maybe they just use daily prices.

What about the 'good times' between 1999 and 2007?