dietcolaaddict

Just bought more silver. Seems as good a dip as any to increase my exposure. People seem more likely to buy a house when the sun is shining. I hope my trip out the office this afternoon in the beautiful spring sunshine hasn't induced the same effect on me!

Good question. My guess is that: - both are similarly susceptible to dollar fluctuation - both have a very similar market sentiment at a given point in time Happy to learn from others with a fuller answer......

Snap, same here Wren! I'm building a cash reserve in GM at the moment, probably to invest in a few months time. I'm also keeping a close eye on Oil and quite fancy a bit of exposure to that should it fall again to the $30's in the summer.

I forgot to attach the graph Just to say I am also a firm believer in Goldfinger's 'sub-100 oz' target for a low in UK houses. It could fall well below that, depending on the unintended consequences of HMG's monetary policies.

I agree but The Evening Standard has an influence on public sentiment, for sure. Every street and railway station vendor, with their red, rusty, portable sales counter thingy, had one of those fake-handwritten banners yesterday proclaiming to Londoners : "House prices rise at last". There are still plenty of suckers, provided they can raise a deposit, who will walk into this 2009 bull-trap. Here's the latest house prices graph (from HPC stalwart Little Professor). The rate of house price decline looks to have peaked now in my eyes, and further falls will, in my opinion, result from a pattern of 2 months of falls, one month of gains etc. Month-upon-month of falls may be over and instead we may have a sort of two-steps-forward-one-step-back type of price decline for the next year or two ot three until we get to the bottom. I guess a bottom may only occur once The Evening Standard no longer dare print "House prices rise at last" banners.

Here's some ammunition for the "Might as well buy now, my (sterling) savings are earning no interest" brigade. Shame it wasn't published on April fool's day to make them think twice. Evening Standard 2 April 2009 http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/art...ices/article.do

I bet they don't do a follow up article on this 'lucky' couple................ http://www.metro.co.uk/news/article.html?C...p;in_page_id=34 Couple celebrate 1p-a-month mortgage Sinking interest rates have left one couple paying just 1p a month in mortgage repayments on their £400,000 London home, it emerged today. Ben Cameron and his pregnant wife Nicola have seen their monthly bill slashed by £1,500 as the Bank of England repeatedly cut the base rate in recent months. Their exceptional payments come as the result of signing a two-year-tracker deal back in 2007 which guaranteed their repayments would be 1.01 per cent below the base rate. And as interest rates have tumbled, so have the payments on their four-bedroom Victorian home in Hampton – with the fact that they are even 1p only down to a computer glitch. The mortgage is a Cheltenham & Gloucester interest-only deal, with rates which observers suggest another 10,000 home-owners currently enjoy. Mr Cameron, a 37-year-old estate agent, told the Evening Standard: 'We feel incredibly lucky - we almost didn't go for it. 'It was only the third broker we approached who flagged up this deal. We look at our mortgage statements now and they look ridiculous, it's fantastic.' He added that the mortgage provider was unable to process a monthly payment of zero, hence their 1p charge. 'Cheltenham & Gloucester sent us a letter saying their admin system couldn't cope and they'd charge us a nominal rate of 0.001 per cent, then refund us,' he said. 'We pay them 24p and they pay us back 23p - it seems very silly.' Nicola Cameron, 28, is expecting the couple's first child in June. So in summary: - £400,000 house to be worth half that soon - Interest only means no repayment mechanism - Just wait till they end up on SVR in a year or so

Shooting season on banks! Stag shooting season (Scotland) 2009 Jul 1 - Oct 20 Banker Shooting season (Worldwide) 2009 Jan 1 - Dec 31

I believe from old research I did, that gold has followed a seasonal pattern in 7 of the last 9 years. With all this money creation, I'm increasingly of the view that 2009 may not be seasonal at all. All conventions are out of the window, it seems.

I'm in the mood for a bit of gold watching this friday afternoon.

I believe 'TheGoldThread@GEI' is now one year old...... As Quantitative Easing panic grips HPC, its pretty clear that banning gold discussion at HPC was a bad idea. Collectively, we had much to say* * - although lets not get complacent, lots of challenges and concerns still in the year ahead

Hi Springer If you are UK-based, is now really the best time to do this WRT exchange rates? How about averaging in over the summer doldrums? Just my opinion, as always do you own research

"Lunch is for wimps"

To all UK GEI members - have your lunch infront of the computer screen today - $1000 is coming very soon.

Kitco is down - always a bullish sign

Like it, double-agent. In my personal opinion, I think we should avoid images of spaceship-shaped objects on launch pads for a while....Ides of March, and all that. On a bulletinboard full of contrarian thinkers (RBS tried to sell me a £ bond the other day while I was in branch at 1.4% pa - are the public really that dumb?), I think we can do some out of the box humour anyway.

Hi qwertyuiop Of course, I agree. But there is one month and two weeks left in the Oct-Mar 'summer season' for gold. If there is going to be a moment in this season yet where the market gets spooked and gets the Hee-Bee-Gee-Bees, its probably likely to be at the $1000 mark

Glad someone got it. I still wonder if living in Milton Keynes had a detrimental effect on my sense of humour!

Gold now at $979. It's been an 11 month wait but gold is very close now to a test on four-figures again, IMHO. If I remember last time correctly, it spiked through $1000 from about 20 dollars below. Well, we are now $20 below. Anything at all goes our way in the markets in the next 24h, then we may breakthrough.

A good day for gold. A test of the $1030 high now looks very likely. I'm going to be a bit more cryptic instead of a traditional Titan or Saturn V.

Well by recent years standard, the price of silver is still cheap compared to gold, although not as much as a month or so ago. PS Double-agent I do like your GDP-denominated sig. Very useful info as I read through posts.

LOL. I've heard MK described as many things, but never 'sunny' before.

Thanks for the insight everyone! This idea that 'debt is normal' is going to bring down the country. I'm off to become a better UK citizen by signing up to a 125% self-cert mortgage on a newbuild, and splashing out on a 4x4 chavmobile (on visa of course!) .

Does keeping your assets in PMs damage your credit rating? I'm currently taking advantage of a local rental market slump to move to a cheaper flat but the letting agents have said my credit rating has come back as poor . I've never missed a bill of any sort for years, always paid off credit cards pronto, earn (net) earning over 8x the annual rent, have a years rent in cash-ISAs (my only exposure to poisonous sterling) . Is it the untraceable sums disappearing from my current account to fund PMs that are denting my credit rating? (For the record I keep physical gold bullion and allocated silver through GM)