Johan van der Smut

Bobsta are you my clone? I was like a nodding dog reading your post.

I'm with Bobsta and dopamine. I feel like a gambler who's suddenly on a losing streak and all but ready to cut his losses so he can sit on the sidelines for a while - more fool me for believing what arguably was hype. My less charitable side entertains the notion that ramping has been replaced by backpedalling in the past couple of weeks. Although I'm relatively sanguine about losing money, I don't know if I'm coming or going as far as inflation/deflation goes, and neither, it seems, do the experts. It all reminds me of William Goldman's axiom in his book Adventures in the Screen Trade, re: predicting which feature films are going to be successful. "Nobody knows anything."

(But some people, I'll grant you, have better track records than others.)

Indeed. But what's suddenly gone wrong with Silver?

Someone liquidating a huge long position? Friday blues? Makes no sense given Gold's resilience.

Although gold's now taking a bit of a dive too.

It was down to $12.24 just now, but has recovered five cents.

Well, silver has just fallen below $12.50, which I think was a previous low.

Anyone know why silver's just fallen off a cliff? Down to $12.37 according to Kitco.

The silver ETF PHAG remains a BUY-IF, I see.

think from memory FP said Gold was going to $750 a few months ago - good call

FP has made good calls all along. I only wish I'd listened to him more closely.

On HPC today he's predicating it might fall to $730 but will be $1,200-1,500 by spring 2010.

Which is helping me not to panic too much, I guess.

Blimey (he said, still not able to sleep and wondering how he's going to get any work done tomorrow). Silver's gone from about $12.50 to $13 in a matter of minutes. Now that's what I call volatile.

The Bullion Desk is showing silver at $12.49 and gold at $790. I don't think I'll be sleeping much tonight.

If you're talking of Jim Puplava, Jim Sinclair, Jim Rogers, Matt Simmons, Puru Saxena, John Williams, James Turk, our very own DrBubb and many more*, they have been saying the same for years and their minds are made up as far as I can tell.

 

EDIT: * like Marc Faber, Antal Fekete, Bill Bonner, John Stepek, and our very own cgnao...

Ah, now, you were doing well until you mentioned cgnao. I don't want to get into the debate about whether he's a visionary or a nutter, because frankly I don't know. He's clearly a clued-up guy. But can someone answer me this: why aren't more of the City and Wall Street's finest preparing for the end of civilisation as we know it? Isn't it just possible that he's a pathological catastrophist with an advanced knowledge of finance?

I'm not trying to be rude - I'm just throwing peanuts because I've found many of the discussions here to be rather incestuous of late. And tonight, with my money on the line, I'm asking the kind of questions that have been bugging me for some time.

EDIT: As for John Stepek - well, I enjoy his Money Mornings very much, but the question remains: why would any financial whizz worth his salt go into a badly paid profession like journalism when there are much bigger rewards elsewhere?

Not really. I'm in with 10% gold and currently subscribe to the 'hold a percentage in gold, and hope it does badly' view. I'm interested in what happens, but certainly not 'crapping myself'.

Sorry, I wasn't presuming to speak for your bowels; only my own.

What's going on in the peanut gallery today? Newbies like Smuttie and Pieshop suddenly come out from the woods where they have been hiding and start stiring up our lovely gold thread here.

It's called "crapping yourself because your investments appear to be tanking" and "challenging what was arguably becoming an increasingly complacent discussion (except when Magpie or wrongmove stuck their oar in) in the hope of gaining reassurance and enlightenment".

PS I like the moniker "Smuttie" though.

Smut

 

My position is weel-researched. I spend a lot of time on reading almost anything I could find on gold.

 

The main phase of the gold bull has not even started yet.

Glad to hear it.

(It's not my real name, btw. It was Goldmember's name in the Austin Powers film.)

Hi Johan van der Smut

Am I right in sensing that you're looking for something solid to grasp onto to help you choosing how to manage your PM investments? If so, please may I suggest you bring it back to basics: Just decide for yourself whether you think the next few years will be all about inflation/stagflation or deflation - without getting confused into thinking the credit crunch 'is' deflation (as its not)

 

If the former, keep and buy, if the latter then sell

Hi bigbigt

As you'll have gathered, I'm a layman in these matters. I mean, I'm a sharp guy, but if the world's top economic minds can't decide what's going to happen, what hope do the rest of us have? So yes, I guess you could say I'm looking for something solid to grasp onto. Thanks for your advice.

Why shouldn't it be possible? Of course, it could happen. In the 1970s, gold had a huge run-up, then plunged 50%, then had another huge run-up.

50% from $1,000 would be $500. I would be buying all the way down. In fact, silver looks now so attractive to me that I am very, very tempted to buy some on credit (NOT margin).

 

This is exactly when I want to buy: when everyone is predicting the end of a commodities market and price inflation, but the fundamentals scream the opposite.

 

This volatility (in gold) has been predicted by Jim Sinclair for a long time. People on margin will see their lives passing by (is what he said).

 

It's a rollercoaster! Weehheee!

The problem that some of us have is that it's difficult to judge whether your position is self assured or fundamentalist.

This from John Nadler neatly sums up the (currently small) 'sell/set a stop-loss' angel on my left shoulder.

 

"Perma-bulls continue to live in denial about the dollar and about the commodities sector. Every drop is a buying opportunity, every rise the start of a new era. But what if - this time - the turn is actually the real thing?

 

Speculative funds poured hundreds of billions into commodities over the past couple of years. Sensing that they had pushed the envelope well past the breaking point, the hedgies are leaving the complex as they perceive that the Fed is not joking about inflation combat, and that regulators are also not joking about oversight of what had become a giant casino - one where "the house" never won. In casino terms, "the die is cast." Rien ne va plus"

 

Most on this site have explained well the 'don't panic' angel on my right shoulder....

Nadler at least adds a crumb of comfort at the end:

Oversold? Sure. Is the bottom in place? Not so sure. Will stormy sessions continue to unnerve? Absolutely sure. Liquidate core holdings out of fear? Not on your life. Holding on to 'life insurance' for your asset basket? Priceless.

This may sound naive, but it stems from a considered conviction that Gold will go up. My chief concern is that conviction stems not from a correct analysis of the situation (I still think it does) but from misjudged analysis as a result of incomplete understanding on my part or group-think at GEI etc. Perhaps I should have been hanging out at Singing Pig etc.!

I'm in a similar predicament. A lot of the debate here goes over my head, so I guess I've been putting my faith in those people whose broad views about debt, house prices etc have so far proven to be correct: Peter Schiff, the staff at Moneyweek et al.

I work, I'm frugal, I save and I've been locked out of the property market. (Actually that's not quite true. I could have probably bought somewhere poky and horrible a couple of years ago, but the groupthink of "property prices always go up" struck me as terribly mistaken.) I also wanted to turbo-charge my deposit and , when gold was nearing £1,030 and silver approaching £21, I was tempted to sell and make a profit of about 20%. Now I guess I'm looking at a 10% paper loss (several thousand pounds) and wondering how much further prices will fall.

I'm actually fairly sanguine about this. If I do lose a few thousand, plus the interest I'd have gained from putting the money in a savings account, I'll put it down to experience. But if my paper losses mount, I don't know how long my resolve will hold. Moreover, if enough investors feel similarly and decide to cut their losses this week, I dread to think what the effect will be.

Then there are the siren voices of people like this:

Bill Cara

In a nutshell, the precious metals are now in a confirmed Bear, and the gold bugs and silver crazies have been duped by their preachers. Now the flock is hearing all the old conspiracy theories, and the dialogue is getting more insane by the day.

gold and silver have turned bearish. If that’s a conspiracy, then how is that the commodity index, copper, palladium, platinum, oil (soon), the Euro, British Pound, Canadian and Australian Dollars, and Japanese Yen also turned bearish at the same time? These prices are all linked. We don’t trade in a vacuum.

Whenever I hear that financial armageddon is just around the corner, or that some lines on a graph show PM prices about to explode, or [as I did on Jim Sinclair's site and on HPC] that particle experiments at CERN next month might cause the end of the world, my conviction wavers.

Although the point about smacking down the gold price at 4.30pm was a good one, I'll admit.

Well, at least there's been a small uptick for the day, from $819 to $825.

$848 and heading vertically downwards.

Bollocks

David Cameron has just been mocking Brown's "financial genius" at PMQs. "This is the man who sold gold at the bottom of the market."

So, will gold become a mainstream topic, I wonder?