Bobsta

I have a link in my signature on "the other site" that seems to have gone un-noticed by the mods. It links to this forum via tinyurl.com so won't get auto-filtered. I agree though. HPC really has turned into some hangout for hippies lately.... all this talk of growing your own food, how investing/profit is bad, etc... Anyone who discovers HPC.co.uk these days has a very high change of thinking it's inhabited by a bunch of "it's not fair, I want a cheap house, anyone who's been successful deserves to rot in hell" jealous whingers. Getting back on-topic ... it's good to see both G&S making a start in the right direction for the week.... (and the GEI board back on-line).

I think you're mistaken if you feel the BoE will simply remove money from circulation. I know if I ran a business and took my daily take of £10,000 to a bank and they said "Sorry, we're going to remove £3,000 of that because you have £3000 in old £20 notes and the BoE wants them back" I'd be pretty miffed. No, when notes are changed, the banks go through a process of withdrawing the old ones from circulation (they eventually get incinerated) and replacing them with the new style. Then there's a grace period where individual holders of the old notes can exchange them at banks, followed by a cut-off after which the old note is no longer legal tender. Similarly, they may choose to release less paper money into circulation... but that's generally driven by the public's decreased demand for notes. If you (as I do) spend most of your money via electronic means (credit/debit cards, BACS and CHAPS transactions, etc.) then you simply don't need as much physical paper (if that's not an oxymoron!) in circulation. But, as I understand it, that *does't* constitute deflation. Think about it: If I get a mortgage for £250,000 and transfer it via CHAPS to the person I'm buying a house from, a bank has created money for me, yet no £20 notes have been needed. If banks decrease their lending and stop giving out as many loans then this money creation *slows* but it certainly doesn't reverse. If they call in a loan early it reverses (as I have to give the money back). But if they reposses my house and I default on my loan this *isn't* deflationary - I got the money, I gave it to someone, I took the house, I didn't pay the loan back (ie I spent my money on other things) and now the bank has a house. That £250,000 they loaned me is still out there in the economy. Sorry for going off on a tangent with (quite a poor) deflation discussion - if anyone has anything that more clearly explains things please post a link ... However, Silent Reader, unless I've misunderstood what you were getting at, the old/new £20 note thing has no relevance IMO.

A great article Steve. Many thanks for taking the time to put it together. As you highlight in the collection of articles, Silver is currently being used up faster than it's mined. In addition, it clearly has more uses than gold. Electronics and jewelery being the obvious ones, but more recently silver is being used in a whole host of materials due to it's antibacterial properties. Only this week I've done my bit to support the Silver price by taking delivery of a new fridge freezer and a new super-king mattress - both containing antibacterial silver coatings. The only counter-argument to this that I feel is worth considering is the simple one of supply and demand. If silver costs $20 an ounce, it makes sense to use it in solder, low-resistance circuitry and in antibacterial medical and home products. If it costs $40 manufacturers (of end products) look at alternatives.... and if it costs $60 they positively scramble for alternatives. Of course, higher prices also drive more mining ... and therefore is this quite an elastic product that can't cope with such a high increase in price (demand falling, supply increasing)? Unfortunately I'm no chemist or "uses of Silver" guru so don't know if there *are* any alternatives to Silver in the applications in which it's typically used today. I've been with Silver since $14 (£16 more heavily... $18 even more heavily) so if we hit $25 I'm happy to just sit back and see what happens. Interesting times ahead.

But the pound's having a mini-rally too. Up against EUR, JPY, CHF, NOK, SEK - everything!

I've noticed recently poor performance from the Kitco.com site... Refreshing the gold, silver, platinum (and I'm sure other) charts often results in a connection failure and a retry being required. Is this potentially a sign of more interest in PMs out there? ... or do I just have an unreliable Internet connection?

Good luck! Silver getting hammered even harder so I've added a sprinkling. Anything in the news to suggest a reason for this? Or just the cartel/market having a shake-out? To be honest, this sort of behaviour just seems par for the course with Ag/Au.

I do it too. If you open (small) positions and leave them alone (ie don't be tempted to jump out and in) then it works well. Don't use stops , or if you do, just make sure they're not too close, or the market will shake you out. BTW, on the topic of how to let folks over at HPC know where we are..... I've just added a signature to my account that links to http://tinyurl.com/2a5ulj - which is a URL I made that points here. Alternatively I may put some general gold info on my personal site (including a link here) and link to that. Freedom of information 'n' all that.

I agree. I cursed myself a few weeks ago at ditching some Silver positions only to watch the price rise and rise. It just so happens that this time I was lucky .... I had some funds to invest and kinda went a bit silly this morning seeing the huge dips in Silver, Gold and Plat. Paying off BIG TIME now. I love going into long meetings at work, popping back to my desk and going WTF?!!! :D

STC is the one and only poster I have blocked on my HPC account. I really can't understand who or what has rattled her cage in the past but she's pure scum AFAIC. (OK, "scum" is a bit strong for a Wednesday morning... but the filth that she posts means she deserves the label IMO.)

I used to work in the hosting business. So to answer your questions: You own a site effectively by owning the domain name (i.e. housepricecrash.co.uk). You then need to "point" www.yoursite to some kind of infrastructure. In the case of HPC.co.uk this is a number (I'd guess two or three) of Linux servers. These servers will physically sit in a datacentre of some sort, and will need connecting to the Internet (most likely with some firewalling in place). The servers run the forum software and we all post lots of stuff on there. Costs for hosting and bandwidth are difficult to estimate. I've worked on infrastructures that cost circa £5000/month up to £180,000/month to manage. There are also smaller outfits who provide hosting on a much cheaper level than this. As I understand it Fubra are a hosting company themselves and are quite likely to be a "cheap and cheerful" outfit rather than a pricey bunch. So, finger in the air, I'd estimate costs (hardware, software, services, power, bandwidth) of ~£2500/month. HPC.co.uk is littered with Google Adwords ads. As has been mentioned previously, these ads are automatically targetted based on the site's content. However, I would argue that the HPC forums *aren't* like most sites. I've used the HPC site for 3+ years now and I'm certain I've *NEVER* clicked on an ad. I would expect the click-through rate to be quite low. I honestly don't see them making "millions" at all. Maybe £10k/month in ad revenue, offset against the hosting and management costs... it's not a huge proft.

As you may recall, I was ready to buy in a big lump yesterday. Fortunately I only went in at around 25% of what I wanted. I've added a similar amount today. Some would call it chasing the market down, I call it averaging in.

Morning all! I'm another HPC convert. I took a look around this site a year or so ago and liked what I saw. However, the "critical mass" of info was over at HPC.co.uk and as time is precious, I generally lurked there. As I think we all appreciate, it's the members who make or break a forum. If most of the more intelligent investment-focussed posters are here at GEI then this is most definitely where I'll be spending my time from now on. Last summer's warnings/info on: 1) The impending credit crunch 2) GBP's impending weakness 3) Gold and Silver as a protective safe haven ... have "saved" or "made" (whichever way you look at it) me a substantial quantity of money (by whatever measure you use). And for that I *really* thank HPC posters including Goldfinger, cgnao, et al. Anyway, sorry to drag the thread down with dull stuff about myself. I look forward to contributing to this thread and the wider forum going forward. Bring on the rockets! Bobsta