What We're Reading

I can’t tell you that gold is a bad investment. Even after the recent plunge, if you bought gold in 2004, your investment would have earned you an annualized rate of about 10.4 percent, after accounting for inflation. That is darned impressive. If you bought in 1994, it would have earned about 3.9 percent per year -- not too shabby. Even if you bought all the way back in 1984, you would have earned 1.8 percent in real terms. (Of course, this assumes that shadowstats.com is wrong, and that inflation hasn’t been massively understated.)

In addition to delivering decent long-term returns, gold has been a way to spread or offset investment risk. As my co-blogger Yichuan Wang showed last year, gold’s return is somewhat negatively correlated with interest rates, so that a bet on gold is to some degree a bet on lower rates. This is actually the prediction of some old economic models, which also indicate that gold should have a positive rate of return over the long term. But a lot of the varia

It may not be a popular view but then again, when everyone's on one side, doesn't the market tend to do the opposite of what's expected?  It seems the Elliott Wavers of the blogisphere are calling for gold to head lower here but I stand by my call of last week that the low will hold and we'll see a head-and-shoulders bottom (right shoulder) forming here.  Silver and all of the miners reflect a similar pattern, as posted here at StockBuz last week.  The weekly even resembles a possible double bottom.  Wouldn't that be sweet!  At the very least, down side risk is defined (last weeks low) but with fear in the market and heavy selling continued after the first of the month, utilities (safe haven) are already hitting a new high and I believe flight to precious metals will continue as well.  At least in the near term.  Not a long/hold.