Gold Investor

Most Gold-Investor.com readers will be familiar with Chris Martenson from his Crash Course and the website, Peakprosperity.com (which is run by him and Adam Taggart). Dr Martenson usually has some sanguine advice when it comes to the economy and our future. In this edition of the Money Metals' Weekly Market Wrap podcast he is interviewed by Mike Gleason about his views on the economy as we ended 2015.

The podcast is titled New Evidence Fed Is “Scared Witless” & Hiked Rates for Show and could well have been titled New Evidence Fed Is “Scared Shitless” & Hiked Rates for Show. Apart from providing his analysis on the actions of the Federal Reserve and its interest rate hike in December of last year, Chris also provides some insights into how the average person can prepare for an uncertain future. Your personal well being, health, attitude and wealth are all at risk of deteriorating we must take action to protect against this decline. And there is a lot more to this than just holding gold and silver.

The oceans of the world hold untold amounts of gold, silver and other riches. Brad Baker, chairman of the publicly traded Odyssey Marine Exploration talks about how his company looks for buried treasures in the oceans. More specifically, we learn more about their operation off the Irish coast to recover the WW2 silver from the SS Gairsoppa that was being sent from India to Great Britain.



One warning as you watch this video. Mr Baker does use a good chunk of this Ted talk to "talk his book" and build up some PR for his company. Can we and do we want to mine the oceans? And is it really environmentally friendly as he would have you believe? This does seem to be becoming the next frontier for mining gold, silver, copper and other materials.

Gold has been always considered a universal currency and played vital role in economy of nations during ancient times. It was earlier considered as a good source for long-term investment and also good addition to user’s investment portfolio. But Gold doesn’t always glitter and with strong dollar values, it has lost its attraction among investors. Since Gold is priced based on US dollars, the yellow metal comes down in value if the USD rises.

Due to revival of US economy and surging interest rates, Gold is not considered as a good form of investment as the money spent in purchasing bullions will not yield any returns. Instead investors look out to invest in stocks with higher dividends, treasury bills or alternate mode of investment like binary options. Gold can be considered as a way to diversify your investment portfolio but it does not yield any earnings or dividend like traditional bonds and stocks. Investing in spot gold or purchasing bullions can only yield returns when people are ready to buy it back at higher cost. But with declining gold value, people are not ready to purchase gold and whoever has invested in it heavily by purchasing Gold at higher price is only suffering now in today’s market conditions. You can gain from a declining gold value by trading binary options which is one of the safest methods of investment which guarantees very high returns on investment.

It has been a while since we've featured market commentary from Jim Rogers but here he is in a recent interview with Erin Ade of RT where he continues to be in top form. Jim seems quite bearish on all assets; including we assume gold and silver. He is still long agriculture and is an especially big fan of sugar, though we hope that his confession of swiping sugar packets from the RT studio's green room was only meant to add more colour to his investment views.



"I know another bear market will come....the next bear market will be much worse than the last one because the debt is much higher...This is the end of the bull market. (US) Stocks will fall 20%."

"We are all going to pay a terrible price for all this money-printing."

Interviews and opinions of Jim Rickards have been featured on this site multiple times. In this interview with Money Morning, Rickards provides a good overview of his economic and strategic philosophy. His belief is that the US is in a long term depression, similar to one it went through between 1870-1900 and the Fed's efforts to pull the economy out of this depression through money printing are not working and distress is hidden. Every dollar of debt is only generating $0.03 of growth versus $2.41 from fifty years ago. Presentation wise, the interview come off as a bit "stiff" (mostly the interviewer) but the first half hour is well worth watching after which there is some native advertising for a version of his book The Death of Money being pushed via Money Morning, which includes some unpublished content he describes as the US government's "Day After Plan Declassified", video briefings and investing/financial advice from Rickards.

Workers demolishing a hundred year old home in St. Cloud, Florida thought they had hit pay dirt when they found over 60 pounds of silver coins hidden in glass jars within the walls of the home. But alas that was not meant to be as the loot of hundreds of silver half dollars, quarters and dimes was confiscated by the local police as the last owner of the house had over half million dollars in fines and levies owed, with the city having a lien on the property.

And in a somewhat similar story, workers in Normandy, France were working on a house and came across a treasure of their own. Once again hidden in jars, these workers found six gold kilo bars and 600 gold $20 coins from 1924 and 1927 - worth a total of over a million dollars in gold - and decided to split it amongst the threesome. After selling the stash to a local coin collector, they were arrested as they came under suspicion after depositing high value cheques.

The tug of war between the deflationists and the (hyper) inflationists is enough to confuse most investors. Both scenarios are plausible and scary when taken to their extreme. David Morgan of Silver-Investor.com talks with The Doc & Eric Dubin of SilverDoctors.com and delves into many of the economic and investment topics that can help guide investors.

The ongoing strikes at South African platinum mines do not seem to be over anytime soon as the industry's union (ACMU) has made some brand new demands of the mining companies. This does not look good for platinum mining in South Africa, which accounts of 80% of worldwide platinum mining, but should be a positive for the price of the precious metal/commodity.

There is a lot of deep reflection taking place in the investment field, with many thinkers trying to wrap their heads around the current economic, geopolitical and investment markets. David Smith, a senior analyst for The Morgan Report presents his views on sticking by one's well researched investment principles.



"If you believe you are right, and the data says hold your ground, then hold your ground."
Eric Sprott

Investors, investment writers, pundits and advisers spend a lot of time mulling and pontificating about how to diversify and structure their portfolios. A whole field in finance - Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) - has been developed and researched to tackle this challenge of maximizing portfolio returns for a given amount of risk which of course, we would like to be minimized. But we still have many views on how diversified, if at all your portfolio should be and in most cases, financial advisers stick to the time honoured advice when it comes to gold. Hold 5% of your portfolio in gold as insurance, either in the form of gold mining stocks, gold certificates or more recently gold ETFs. Then we have the other side where the advise is often about impending doom and gloom, driving investors to hold the majority of their investment in gold (silver and other precious metals). Is there any middle ground?

I guess anyone could put together a portfolio that is somewhere between the 5% gold and 95% gold but one that has existed for a while and is worthy of a re-look is the Permanent Portfolio. Investment newsletter and book writer Harry Browne, introduced the Permanent Portfolio in his book, Fail-Safe Investing: Lifelong Financial Security in 30 Minutes. This book provides readers with a lot of advice on how to invest (Browne presents 17 rules on investing) and it is probably best known for its suggested portfolio allocation where gold plays a major role.