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- Gold & Silver Warrants Index (GSWI) Constituents: March Update
- $50 silver - The Price Point of Liberty
- Upside to the Downgrade: It's a Wake-Up Call
- Bullish Gold/Equity Markets Could Make Newmont Shine Even Brighter
- Ratings Agencies Become Even More Useless
- Standard and Poor's Blindsides U.S. Market
- Apricus Trades Higher on Long Term
- Texas University's $1 Billion in Gold Bars
- Electric Utility SCANA: Shorts Are Wrong, No Meltdown
- What If Precious Metals ‘Mania’ Hits India Or China? Part I
- <p>Tomorrow happened yesterday</p>
- $1 Billion of Gold Bars Taken Delivery of by…
- Clint Eastwood would be proud...
- Gold & Silver Touch New Records as Athens Denies "Restructuring" Talks
- "Alarm zone": Inflation exploding in key Asian country
- Silver ready to pass $50-an-ounce this week to set new all-time high
- Got Phyzz? US CREDIT RATING CUT BY S&P
- Verified vs non-verified pm sales on ebay?
- Finnish anti-bailout party's election victory causes euro tremor
- A Golden Incentive for Utah
- The Finnish Monkey Wrench
- Long May Gold and Silver Run
- Darwinian Bookies Gone Wild: “The Big Short” Review
- Gold Is Stable in Value 2: Interest Rates
| Gold & Silver Warrants Index (GSWI) Constituents: March Update Posted: 18 Apr 2011 06:34 AM PDT The galaxy of warrants consists of only 146 stars (i.e. constituents) of which only 33 are associated with 30 commodity-related stocks that have sufficient brightness (i.e. 24+ months duration) to warrant (the pun is intended!) the attention of earthly investors. Words: 1579 |
| $50 silver - The Price Point of Liberty Posted: 18 Apr 2011 06:04 AM PDT $50 dollar silver is the first sign of blue sky after a devastating storm. It's the morning after sunshine bringing people out of hiding and together again for the process of rebuilding with the promise of a new start. |
| Upside to the Downgrade: It's a Wake-Up Call Posted: 18 Apr 2011 05:51 AM PDT Market Blog submits: By David Berman Hitting rock bottom is an important part of any recovery process. Maybe this is what the United States is about to learn after Standard & Poor's cut the country's credit rating outlook to "negative" and warned that an actual downgrade could come within two years. But even though stocks were getting destroyed on Monday morning in reaction to the shift, U.S. government bonds, the U.S. dollar and gold were all holding steady. Why? Beata Caranci, deputy chief economist, Toronto-Dominion Bank, raises an interesting point in a note to Complete Story » |
| Bullish Gold/Equity Markets Could Make Newmont Shine Even Brighter Posted: 18 Apr 2011 05:46 AM PDT King of All Trades submits: By Relmor Demitrius With record gold and silver prices hitting in 2011, many investors are exploring different ways to profit off this trade. The obvious way is to buy or sell physical gold or silver. This is the safest and most tedious way to play the precious metals trade. Some purchase gold certificates or buy into gold bonds or trusts, like the Central Fund of Canada (CEF), which owns a mixture of both gold and silver, or the SPDR Gold Trust (GLD), which tries to match the exact price of gold. The common direct silver play is purchasing the IShares Silver Trust (SLV), which tries to emulate the exact price of silver. All these are relatively safe investments for people looking to play gold or silver with paper long term. However, more profits can be made by wise and timely playing a gold or silver company through their equity offering, Complete Story » |
| Ratings Agencies Become Even More Useless Posted: 18 Apr 2011 05:20 AM PDT Cullen Roche submits: Last December I warned that the ratings agencies were likely to downgrade the credit rating of the USA. And this morning they went ahead and slapped a "negative" rating on U.S. credit:
Complete Story » |
| Standard and Poor's Blindsides U.S. Market Posted: 18 Apr 2011 04:59 AM PDT Chris Damas submits: Standard & Poor's debt rating service downgraded the sovereign credit rating outlook for the United States to "negative" – U.S. and Canadian stock markets dropped quickly. The DJIA futures were already down 65 before the announcement due to another half point increase by the Chinese for their bank minimum reserve requirements. Crude oil futures were also down almost $2 on Saudi comments that the market is oversupplied. An hour into trading, the DJIA had dropped to a low of 12,099 or 242 points and is currently down 207 at 12,132. The Canadian S&P/TSX index is 13,598 down 200 points helped slightly by a rally in gold which was up $13 to $1,498 on the June contract, but is only up $2.60 now. What's my take on this latest bad news Monday morning? First – I've been bearish for the last few weeks and have been waiting for the 2011 DJIA Complete Story » |
| Apricus Trades Higher on Long Term Posted: 18 Apr 2011 04:38 AM PDT VFC submits: Shares of Apricus Biosciences (APRI) were trading higher last week, once again breaching the five dollar barrier, after the company announced that it had filed with the U.S. FDA to receive an orphan drug designation for RayVa, Apricus' experimental new treatment for Raynaud's phenomenon, a condition in which the blood supply to the fingers or toes is suddenly reduced. RayVa is currently being geared up for Phase III trials and utilizes Apricus' proprietary NexACT drug delivery technology, one in a fairly robust pipeline of products utilizing the technology. The announcement of the orphan drug designation filing wouldn't be enough - on its own (in my opinion) - to send shares of Apricus higher, but there are some potential short term milestones in the works to which shares of APRI could be responding. According to recent comments by the CEO Dr. Bassam Damaj, the company is in late-stage talks with multiple Complete Story » |
| Texas University's $1 Billion in Gold Bars Posted: 18 Apr 2011 04:27 AM PDT  Tim Iacono submits: Institutional investors are no doubt recoiling on news that one of their very own – the $20 billion Texas University Endowment Fund – has taken a $1 billion position in dumb ol' gold bars, stored on their behalf in New York vaults, collecting dust but earning no interest and paying no dividend. This report at Bloomberg has all the details:
Complete Story » |
| Electric Utility SCANA: Shorts Are Wrong, No Meltdown Posted: 18 Apr 2011 04:26 AM PDT George Fisher submits: SCANA (SCG) is a natural gas and electric utility with the highest percentage of shares short of any company in the utility sector. Headquartered in Columbia, SC, SCG provides over 600,000 customers with electricity and 700,000 customers with natural gas. With 32% of outstanding shares short, a lot of investors are betting against the company. The reasons seem pretty obvious. SCANA operates one nuclear power complex and is about 14% completed with the construction of a new nuclear plant of which is will be 55% owner. The shorts' thesis is:
Complete Story » |
| What If Precious Metals ‘Mania’ Hits India Or China? Part I Posted: 18 Apr 2011 04:06 AM PDT A common refrain with many precious metals commentators (including myself) is that "one day" there will be an investor "mania" in this sector, where prices will finally explode into some sort of parabolic "top". For those who have wasted any of their time reading the gold-bubble babble currently on display on a daily basis in the mainstream media, "no" the day when gold and/or silver reach "bubble" status is not even currently visible on the most distant horizon. Put another way, as John Williams of Shadowstats.com tells us, just to "equal" its 1980-high (in "real", inflation-adjusted dollars), gold would have to rise to $7,500/oz. Meanwhile, at its historic 15:1 price-ratio with gold (the average for the last 5,000 years), that would put the price of silver at $500/oz. Naturally, the fundamentals for gold and silver are much, much, much more "bullish" today than they were in 1980 – when our economies first had their ties to "good money" totally severed. Thus, $7,500/oz for gold and $500/oz for silver should not be seen as any kind of "price ceiling", but rather more of an intermediate price target. With the bankers doing everything they possibly can to drive the values of their fiat currencies to zero, then the "long-term price targets" for gold and silver are simply "infinity": the "price" of gold and silver, when defined in terms of worthless paper. However, there is one event which could interfere with this progression: if investor "mania" should hit the sector before the bankers' fiat-paper has been deemed worthless by the masses. Ironically, I view such a "mania" as the worst thing that could happen to this sector, should it take place before the final implosion of the bankers' paper empire. The reason such a development is to be thoroughly dreaded is because of the inevitable progression of all manias. As prices explode to what seem to be excessive levels (even though those prices are defined in already-worthless paper), there would/will be a clear, intermediate "top" in the market. By definition, that peak would represent "irrationally" high prices for gold and silver. In the current context, for gold and silver prices to be "irrational" that would likely imply a sudden spike to a five-digit number for gold, and a four-digit number for silver. Expanding on this irony, such a price-explosion in the precious metals sector would present precious metals investors with a terrible dilemma. On the one hand, all such manic peaks are followed by a "crash" – even in the case of precious metals, where "mania prices" would still undervalue precious metals versus worthless, fiat paper. Thus over the short or even medium term, investors would know that they would be about to experience an horrific plunge in the value of one of their assets. The obvious, rational response to such a parameter is to sell – and take profits. Conversely, those knowledgeable investors in this sector would also know that after the inevitable crash, that precious metals would immediately boomerang back up again – eventually exceeding any "peak" experienced during the original mania. This would cause precious metals investors to want to hold onto their assets – and simply absorb a crash. Having already been through the Crash of '08, and having watched my portfolio plunge toward zero once, I can say on behalf of all investors who were subjected to this that it is not a pleasant experience. And yet it would still likely be preferable to the "danger" of taking profits at the peak of the mania. |
| <p>Tomorrow happened yesterday</p> Posted: 18 Apr 2011 02:57 AM PDT The latest data show more remarkable developments in time travel. You have to see it to believe it. And even then, you rub your eyes and wonder. In the US, the financial sector is riding high. Again. After bringing the whole world economy to its knees three years ago, profits for the industry are back where they were before the crisis began 4 years ago. For every dollar of corporate profit made in the United States of America in 2011, nearly 30% comes from shuffling money. |
| $1 Billion of Gold Bars Taken Delivery of by… Posted: 18 Apr 2011 02:01 AM PDT |
| Clint Eastwood would be proud... Posted: 18 Apr 2011 01:29 AM PDT 1500 Dollar Gold - No longer "A Fistful of Dollars" away but just "For A Few Dollars More" :biggrin: I expect a showdown at this level! R. |
| Gold & Silver Touch New Records as Athens Denies "Restructuring" Talks Posted: 18 Apr 2011 12:50 AM PDT Bullion Vault |
| "Alarm zone": Inflation exploding in key Asian country Posted: 18 Apr 2011 12:49 AM PDT From Newsmax: India's March inflation rose more than expected to nearly nine percent as manufacturing and fuel costs increased, government data showed Friday, adding to worries about pricing pressures across emerging Asia. The International Monetary Fund warned this week that emerging Asia is in danger of overheating as rapid growth, high output, and loose monetary policy push prices up. China said Friday that March inflation hit a 32-month high, despite official efforts to cool prices, and central banks across the region are expected to keep hiking rates despite predictions of slower growth in the wake of Japan's crippling quake and tsunami. The latest data from India suggest that the price problem in Asia's third-largest economy has become a structural issue, driven by rising incomes and a failure to increase the supply of goods fast enough to meet fresh demand, rather than by volatile food and fuel prices alone. Even as demand has soared... Read full article... More on India: These commodities are now a one-way bet The stars continue to align for dramatically higher coal prices Forget the "fear trade"... This is the No. 1 reason gold is soaring |
| Silver ready to pass $50-an-ounce this week to set new all-time high Posted: 18 Apr 2011 12:27 AM PDT Silver looks set for a sprint past its all-time high of $50 established 31 years ago this week. But with Goldman Sachs now advising its clients to get out of commodities and Glencore, the world's largest commodities trader launching its $11 billion IPO most probably on Thursday, the end of this surge could come quickly. |
| Got Phyzz? US CREDIT RATING CUT BY S&P Posted: 18 Apr 2011 12:09 AM PDT How the $US isnt getting fuckin killed is exactly what is wrong with free capital markets, in which "he who has the most free printed money wins." Lights out within a month. Good luck in May silver delivery and June for Gold Blythe. |
| Verified vs non-verified pm sales on ebay? Posted: 17 Apr 2011 11:54 PM PDT What is the difference for the seller when selling pm to verified vs non-verified buyers on ebay? Is it ok to sell small amounts, say under $200 to non verified buyers? |
| Finnish anti-bailout party's election victory causes euro tremor Posted: 17 Apr 2011 11:07 PM PDT The euro depreciated against the US dollar and the Japanese yen on Monday over fears of Greek debt restructuring and the victory of the populist True Finns party in a general election in Finland, traders said... Read |
| Posted: 17 Apr 2011 10:10 PM PDT A Golden Incentive for Utah Sunday, April 17, 2011 by David Batson Please note that I will be publishing an article here every Sunday afternoon until I have completed my registration as a Commodity Trading Advisor (CTA) with the National Futures Association (NFA). After that, I will only write infrequently. People are not so complicated. Once you understand their ethics, you can begin to predict what they will do--what actions they will take in physical reality. One of the easiest ways to delve into another man's ethics is by examining his incentives. They do not tell you if a man is moral or not, but they will tell you what he is likely to do based on his value system. Whether you are discussing the immoral, evil dictator of an oil-rich nation seeking to keep his position--or at least his gold--in the midst of a bloody uprising or the moral, productive businessman seeking to bring a product to market from which he is likely to reap a rich profit; the motivation to continue comes from the value likely to be gained. You do not gain the ability to see the future (because it has not happened yet) but evaluating incentives in both others and ourselves is a prime method of developing useful likelihoods. Utah is in the midst of a push to allow gold and silver to be legal tender in the state. This is a great idea and I support it wholeheartedly. The reason is that I understand the incentive that is being created for the primarily moral, productive people of Utah. Utah is a major mining state. The development of mining --delayed initially by an emphasis on agriculture until the 1860s--was critical in their development as a state and a major economic hub of the Rocky Mountain region; bringing the Midwest and the Western United States together in a very benevolent synthesis. Mining-- everything from metals to hydrocarbons to trace minerals--is still Utah's economic backbone and is only becoming more important in the current epochal bull market in commodities. It is unsurprising that such a culture is watching the ongoing destruction of the US dollar by the Federal Reserve and realizing they would rather be compensated by the money they rip from the earth's crust at great risk to life, limb and capital than some pieces of paper created by a few clicks on a mouse by a stuffed suit in a bank set up specifically to defraud the public (albeit on a legalized basis). What will the result be if Utah allows an implicit gold standard in their state (for that is precisely what it will amount to over time)? Well, let's look at the incentive. Money is a huge motivator. It represents all of the physical values that man needs to live. These physical values, by extension, allow us to enjoy the positive abstractions that make life worth living: happiness, security, love chief among them. But money's primary value comes only from and to the extent that it helps to secure our other physical values. When the people of Utah look at the declining purchasing power of the US dollar (and no one can deny that it is declining) and the undeniable rise in gold, silver and other commodities, are they likely to be more or less productive when incentivized by a form of money that is on the rise as opposed to one that is sharply in decline? You don't even have to be a miner to understand the answer is that they will be likely to be more productive when working to earn a form of money that is increasing in its ability to purchase their physical values. Now, it is unsurprising that the most concerted attempt to legalize transactions in precious metals is coming from a state that is heavily vested in these materials, but the lesson holds for all of us. The Federal Reserve is destroying your dollar-denominated savings by design. Here is hoping that Utah succeeds in its plan to create a counter to that decline in the form of a money that has intrinsic luxury value and that the logic spreads across the country over the next decade. I don't know that we will wind up with a by-law gold standard, but I do think we would be well served to see a de facto gold standard emerge and this process in Utah is an important data point in that transition. more here: David Batson http://insidefutures.com/article/257...or%20Utah.html |
| Posted: 17 Apr 2011 09:44 PM PDT
04-17 Sunday
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| Darwinian Bookies Gone Wild: “The Big Short” Review Posted: 17 Apr 2011 08:02 PM PDT
When it came to "The Big Short," though, I found myself hesitant to read it. Not for lack of interest, but because I was tapped out on financial crisis books at the time it was published. After "Too Big To Fail" by Sorkin, "The Greatest Trade Ever" by Zuckerman, "The End of Wall Street" by Lowenstein, and a stack of other materials eight inches high, I was sick of reading about the subprime crisis and its aftermath. "The Big Short" is made all the better, though, by revisiting the topic a year or two down the road. As Leonardo da Vinci once said: "Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back your judgment will be surer. Go some distance away, because the work appears smaller and more of it can be taken in." The da Vinci advice also holds true for major market events. Thumbing through "The Big Short" in a bookstore prior to a plane trip, I was immediately drawn in by the color and the profiles. It's the little details, plus the great explanations and laugh-out-loud moments, that make Lewis so good.
The book tells the story of the subprime crisis through a handful of worthy characters (who all made a killing in the collapse): Steve Eisman, the foul-mouthed iconoclast disgusted by Wall Street; Michael Burry, the one-eyed doctor with Asperger's Syndrome; Greg Lippman, the bond trader with Fonzie sideburns who talked of ripping people's eyeballs out; Charlie Ledley and Jamie Mai, two goofballs who started out in a Berkeley garage with a Charles Schwab account, and so on. Thinking about the subprime crisis with the benefit of da Vinci's distance, it struck me anew how Darwinian and predatory the whole system is. One constantly has to ask, Cui Bono: "Who benefits?" And Ubi Est Mea: "Where's mine?" One of Eisman's traders was constantly obsessed with how the party on the other side might screw him (though "screw" was not the word used). That is probably a good attitude to have on Wall Street. Lewis also does a good job of explaining why the subprime disaster was so huge. What Goldman and the other i-banks did was diabolically ingenious: When it became obvious there were not enough actual mortgages to go around, they simply created bets on top of bets (via complicated derivative products) for the purpose of fulfilling speculative demand. In this the banks were like bookies making a point spread on the Super Bowl — except this wagering pool was 1,000 times bigger. Through vehicles like "CDOs squared," they took on hundreds of billions in bets with no direct market function, enjoying the middleman's cut. On one side, bears like Eisman, Burry, Lippmann and Paulson sought to short every bad mortgage they could find. On the other side, happy-go-lucky bulls like Wing Chau sought to buy every crappy mortgage product they could find, taking in ridiculous fees for "managing" these pools of toxic high yield assets on behalf of brain-dead institutional investors. (Like the "stupid Germans," as Lewis repeatedly references them.) In many ways, Wall Street is a giant casino. While activity on Wall Street is supposed to be productive and purposeful, much of it is pure gambling. And with side bets hundreds of times bigger than the actual market, in exotic subprime derivatives the casino operators had found a loophole bigger than the St. Louis arch. The trouble, though, is that the prey was too stupid this time. For a predator-prey relationship to hold up over the long term, there has to be a sustainable ecology balance. The "dumb money" cannot be so dumb as to completely incinerate itself. The actions of AIG and the ratings agencies were just so fantastically moronic, however, that the sharks simply could not help gorging to the point of bursting. And then, in the height of the feeding frenzy, the predators got dumb too. In holding too much product on the books, the i-banks were getting "high on their own supply" as Tony Montana might phrase it. The final result was pure insanity, and the foundation-shaking disaster that followed. Reviewing this book in 2011, I am reminded (yet again) of just how insane Wall Street can be. "Mr. Market," as famously described by Benjamin Graham, is often portrayed as a basically logical guy. But the reality is a bit different. In truth, Mr. Market is a cross between Gordon Gekko and Forrest Gump. Sometimes very savvy, sometimes insatiably greedy, he can also be so intensely thick-headed as to boggle the mind. That is why the market has a distinctly non-efficient habit of driving itself off a cliff every so often. This happens over and over again. With the detailed chronicling of the subcrime crisis that "The Big Short" and other books like it provide, one would hope the academics would wake up. Up until now, academia has been on the Forrest Gump side of the equation, pushing perfect-world theories so obtuse as to make a trader's eyes cross. The reality of the marketplace is overwhelmingly human, with all the gullibility and deceit and rampant self-interest that such a reality entails. To the degree we collectively forget that, the stage is set for more disaster. JS p.s. Like this article? For more, visit our Knowledge Center!  |
| Gold Is Stable in Value 2: Interest Rates Posted: 17 Apr 2011 07:16 PM PDT New World Economics |
Mercenary Links Roundup for Sunday, April 17th (below the jump).
Michael Lewis is just a great, great writer. "Liar's Poker" is a classic read for all traders. "Moneyball" was one of the best books I have read in years. Lewis' Vanity Fair articles on Iceland, Greece and Ireland were all must reads.| You are subscribed to email updates from Gold World News Flash 2 To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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