pjohnp

No, I don't recommend that.

Hey, come on you lot. The gold thread is one of sanest threads on this board: don't go spoiling it! GF, I'm glad you're back: yours were always some of the posts that encouraged me most in my p/m dabbling. But "No wonder I had to essentially stop posting at this joint!" isn't why you left: that was after a ridiculous spat with Dr B about trading versus holding (a false dichotomy if ever I saw one). So less crowing, please .. and fewer split infinitives if you also choose sometimes to post solely in Latin. Stay with us, join in the conversation like a man, and don't show frustration with those of us who post financially naïve comments ... it may just be that we're busy in the world outside and don't know as much about markets as you do.

Yes, sorry: guilty as charged. I've looked briefly at one or two bits, cuch as this -- http://www.raidersnewsupdate.com/ -- and recoiled, having had my instincts confirmed that we're dealing here with puerile drivel. The over-excited, intellectually-facile, downright ignorant Christiano-triumphalist rubbish, (mis-)using the tired old categories of Antichrist, Armageddon, and other such talismans of pseudo-Biblical American ecclesio-imperialism is just simply too wearisome for words. I shall retreat to the other board that you've kindly created, hope that you'll send the house-price thread to join me, and go back to my preferred method of visiting these boards for financial and economic insights, and somewhere else (where people can distinguish literary types and have a sense of historical context) for my theology.

I agree that the authorities fob us off with smooth falsehoods while they quietly do much of their (sometimes rather different) business behind the scenes ... it's always been like that. But there's a difference in kind between the US secretly doing business with the Taliban (I'd be surprised and even disappointed if they weren't) and the Vatican doing the same with aliens! One is realpolitik and the other is fantasy ... Confusing the two is tedious, and a good reason for having discussion of house prices moved, as you suggest, out of earshot of such stuff.

Because it's the only thread that I visit this section for, and I have to tiptoe round the Pope being in league with aliens and the Twin Towers being blown up by the Israelis to get here.

Yes please!

Thank you. It looks to me like a good contra-indicator ... as one might have expected!

I'm not a great chartist, but I keep half an eye on the retail physical market, and when dealers are offering to buy sovereigns at spot price, it suggests that they've a lot of unfulfilled demand to buy: http://www.hattongardenmetalsnews.co.uk/2013/01/rate-increase-100-market-rate-for-the-full-gold-sovereign/

It's been four days since anything sensible was posted here. If I want alchemy or little green men there are other sites I can visit. But where am I to find grown-up discussion of precious metals, and wise investing in troubled times? It used to be here, but I really don't know where to look now. Dr Bubb persuaded me to return, when "millions of humans living on Mars" had proved to be, I thought, the final straw .. but even the mainstream, pinned, Gold thread seems to be swamped with drivel now.

Combine the gold threads: I waste too much time here without having to look at two threads about the same topic. And never mind all this long/short term stuff, which has led to such ridiculous tiffs: gold is gold, and some will try and increase their profits by buying & selling at troughs & peaks ... but surely anyone sensible has a core holding (of wealth that governments can't inflate away.) Keep silver separate: some of us deal only in gold (you can hide it more easily!)

That's the residue of physical gold that I have ... but (burglars please note) I don't keep it at home. So it's real profit, and I'm only gradually easing out of it -- broadly speaking by selling half every time it doubles in value (though the process is a bit more complex than that, because it doesn't double very often, and won't keep doing so for ever.)

Thanks for this. I know very little about economics, but have always admired Bernard Baruch, the "park-bench statesman". He used to say "I made my money by selling too soon". That's been my approach, and after taking a deep breath and borrowing a lot of money to buy gold a few years ago, I've been selling it too soon for quite a while now, and have paid back my debts and still have about £50,000-worth (more than all my assets before I started). It's been by a long chalk the best financial decision of my life, and I'm very grateful to these boards -- not least you and your antagonist the quasi-hoarder Goldfinger.

The only undeniable gold-price statistic that I've noticed is the correlation between downward movements in the price of gold on the one hand, and the grumpiness of this thread on the other. The price has just suffered its biggest ever drop that I can remember ... and I've never known this thread to be tetchier, with nervous gold-holders being quite rude to Dr B. I'm reminded of the observation of Dr Johnson in Edinburgh, hearing two women arguing across the street, from the upper storey of one house to another: "They'll never agree, because they're arguing from different premises". Of course Dr B is right, that you can make more money trading than holding gold, if you get the timing right: that's just a mathematical certainty. But it takes time and skill -- and most of us haven't got much of either. And of course he's right, that those who only predict rises in the gold price are in danger of doing a disservice to their readers: we need to know (in good time!) when to sell ... and no-one's telling us that. Will they still be saying "hold", or even "buy" at and beyond the eventual peak? It seems to me that "buy & hold" is only half a strategy. For what purpose, and for how long, should I hold it? (I expect to be dead in the next thirty or forty years.) I'd like to hear more about exit strategies and timing: neither traders like Dr B nor hoarders lke GF give me quite what I need. When they dissatisfy me good-naturedly it's one thing ... but when this thread is both unhelpful and bad-tempered, I can do without it.

Anecdotally: I buy bits & pieces of gold at auction every month, and today was the first day for more than two years that I've been outbid on everything: bids on scrappable gold were all at least 15% above today's spot price. So whatever's been happening amongst the big boys, the demand from little people for physical gold is as high as ever. It feels odd, though, coming home empty-handed!

I hadn't imagined that it worked like that. They're offering to buy, and so if anyone's selling to them they'd have stock. Surely they make their money on the spread?

What I find odd is that even with everyone supposedly selling, it's still almost impossible to get one's hands on much real metal. I bought three Krugerrands from Hatton Garden today ... and they were the last three gold coins they had in stock. While that remains true I won't feel anxious buying, for all the chartists' gloom.

I love this sort of talk, and I feel very grown-up to be mixing with such rich people. Me, I just keep buying a hundred here and a hundred there. But it makes me happy.

But I'm not convinced of its accuracy. Hatton, for example, are actually paying 4% below spot for sovereigns. I use Chards, who are currently paying just 2% below.

On the contrary, living by some railway lines is a great pleasure. Occasional trains, wending their way to mysterious or romantic destinations, all helping keep cars off the roads: it's a pleasure to watch and to listen to them. There was a train line at the bottom of my garden in Coventry thirty years ago, and it was a joy. I'd pay more for the pleasure of it.

Thank you. I can understand that. So it's hard to envisage that those "Sell your gold ads" will ever cease ... or that I'll ever want to buy paper currency with my gold. I may at some point want to buy something else with it, of course ... and I'll then be able to have a lot more of the something else than if I'd kept my (modest) wealth in paper currency.

Help me understand this, please. (I'm not very clever with these things.) I take the ads to be a good sign that I'm safe to keep buying gold (since cleverer people than me are going to a lot of trouble to do so). When they stop those ads, is it becoming time for me to sell?

I keep reading this sort of stuff on here, and I'm not convinced. Surely it means that the increase is geometric, rather than arithmetic. Exponential would look quite different, woudn't it?

Neither discrete (it's one big coin) nor discreet (it's all over the newspapers).

No. Though they may be included in that number.

Just substitute the word "black" for "Jewish" in some of the earlier posts on this thread and have a little think about it.