STOCKS: I got almost completely out of the market today

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I am not an expert, just giving my opinion and thoughts here…

I believe in balancing my investments, this includes into pm.

I buy through APMEX (American precious metal exchange). They’ve always been good to me and appear from my research to be trusted.

I don’t much care for the form my form of pm, but I admittedly don’t buy coins… I think (opinion) you’re buying the novelty (example… my brother has several pounds of silver and a couple gold coins with Disney characters… for whatever reason he has loved Disney since we were kids. He bought these in part to have the pm, in part to have the commemorative nature of the coin), and I care about value not novelty.

You generally pay a transactional fee buying pm, so while gold (rough and probably inaccurate figures) is 2000 an ounce and silver is 25 an ounce, you’ll actually pay a little more than that due to (select from the following) taxes, shipping, transaction fee, etc. you’re likely to have similar fees when selling, so work that into your long term plans.

Pm is a long term investment… it will not split or pay out dividends like most stocks do… think of it like a share of class a Berkshire stock. You will pay a price for it, later you will sell it for a price. Given inflation this is likely to be in your favor. You could also think of it like a home, it could lose money, but that realistically is not likely.

A lot of people poo poo silver compared to gold. I don’t, because of utility. I used to manage a pharmacy, and silver is used in medications (such as for burns). Silver is used (although less today) in the chemicals to develops photography. They actually have silver recovery units to filter those chemicals to try to save silver. Silver is used in machinery, especially medical. I can only think of one utilitarian application for gold (I am overlooking jewellery or financial), and that comes from a teacher I had in the 90s who admittedly could have been full of poop… he said he would have a gold injection to help with his arthritis.

So the way I view it, silver has a utility, which will over time reduce the available amount of silver increasing its value.

Don’t forget, there are also other metals to invest in such as platinum or palladium.

You can turn your 401k and all that into gold and silver versions (and not necessarily just 401k), but I’m not keen on this… as Nick said earlier : possession. Worst case scenario would be theft (embezzlement), but a second wcs: the company you’ve invested your savings in pm goes belly up…. Not you’ve lost everything… if I am investing in it, I wanna have it in my possession, not in someone else’s who promises that they’ll give it to me when I want it.

Get a good safe, something truly awesome, if you can place it in a place you can kind of hide; and go.

I’m not a financial advisor, and I am not saying I agree with Nick about moving everything to pm, but my financial plans have had pm as a factor, and in the future pm and property (land houses etc) are what I view as the way to go for most of my investments.

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I don’t know if I am sold on holding physical gold yet. I like the idea of having it on hand in a way. It is shiny and impressive and makes for something cool to show to people and talk about. But it comes at a fairly steep premium relative to the underlying asset.

The other option I am exploring is a gold ETF. Below is the performance of the GLD ETF over the last 5 years. Each share purchased represents 1/10 of an ounce of gold.

Is it flashy and can I trade it for a bottle of water in Timbuktu when I am 1000 miles form the nearest McDonalds? No. But I don’t plan to be in that position any time soon. I feel like this might be a good way to actually invest in gold, without paying a premium for holding the physical asset.

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Every central bank around the world holds physical gold… and they are buying more.

Gold rush continues unabated in 2024 -11Onze.

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How does that support the holding of physical gold over holding a gold ETF though?

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If you can’t stand on top of something and defend it with a rifle, you don’t own it

In fact a retail investor is pretty much last in line in a bankruptcy.

This isn’t to say it’ll disappear tomorrow, it probably won’t but if Wall Street pulls shenanigans, it’s a big club and you are just a guest at the party.

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I like that analogy.

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When the day comes that you have to defend your gold with your gun then… Jack you dead. Besides, what is it that you think you’ll be able to buy with your gold in a “when the shit hits the fan” scenario?

Gold has the peculiar quality of poisoning your mind, hence the term Gold Fever. Personally the only thing worse than holding gold is holding cash, as gold is fairly illiquid and you will always incur a hefty transaction cost when buying and selling gold. The Expense Ratio for owning GLD is 0.400% verses 0.030% for a typical U.S. Broad Market ETF.

Personally, gold has underperformed all of my other holdings including stocks and real estate as it should, since it really isn’t a real investment anyway.

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I don’t know what will be for sale in such a situation, but I know it will take gold to buy it. But it doesn’t have to be “shit hits the fan” situation for gold to be what you will need. Hyper inflation is all it takes and we’re about to see that here in the U.S.

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There is not one single technical indicator that currently exists to corroborate the notion we are on the cusp of “Hyper inflation”… it is simply the type of hyperbole that is common on websites who push gold sales.

pce-goods-svcs-figure1

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If SHTF, eventually, gold will become valuable. But in a hard reset situation, it will be a resource economy: medicine for food, food for bullets, etc.

I can see gold hedging against it. But has that theory been tested in other parts of the world where inflation has decimated the economy?

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It’s a rhetorical device. It’s hyperbole to make a point. At no point do I think I will be standing on my Scrooge McDuck pool filled with gold, trying to defend it.

The point however got across didn’t it? Holding an ETF, while generally useful and probably fairly safe, means you’re at the mercy of other people who pinky promise to fulfill their obligations to pay you. I.e. you don’t really own it, do you?

This whole trope of “You can’t eat gold” is factual but not truthful. Michael Malice, a guy I’ve listened to for years uses this example to describe factual but not truthful: "-A store goes out of business -HEADLINE: Store Owner Refuses to Sell Food to Hungry Kids.

There will ALWAYS be someone willing to exchange gold for the local Quatloos. It always existed, it always will, right up until we can make gold in our backyard particle accelerator.

Gold was a bad investment from about 2010 until 2019 or so. If you bought at the peak back then, it took nearly a decade to recover. It is a store of value that won’t go to zero, at least not until I build a particle accelerator out of an old clock.

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I completely disagree. It all depends on the level of devastation. Are we talking about nuclear war or hyperinflation?

Water, food, medicine, energy…those are the priorities that will be traded initially in a major event such as nuclear war.

If the economy has skeletal remains (such as in a hyperinflation situation), then I believe gold will hold a value.

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You can go to the most failed of all states on the globe, right now(Somalia), today and exchange gold for anything you want. Of course, you need to arrive with your own army, but that’s just detail.

Gold represents value. Someone will always trade it because they expect some level of return in the future.

Even Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” has room for it. I can carry around gold, go to a new location and buy a slave. Hauling a slave from one place to another is a lot of work.

Small, dense, valuable, portable. It ticks all the boxes.

For what it’s worth, do not trade ammo. While you think “I’ll just trade it to my best buddy Bob”. Bob isn’t the problem. Bob trades it to his acquaintance Jim. Jim is a stand up guy, but his drug addict son Travis isn’t. Travis trades bullets to his heroin dealer, Sean. Sean shows up at your door and shoots your dog and nearly gets you.

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Look at the graph you posted. You literally posted a graph of the past just after using the word “indicator” in your sentence above it.

I’m looking at the future.

At a 6% interest rate, 80% of all the federal taxes collected will have to go to just pay the interest on the national debt. The only way to pay for all this government and interest is to print dollars and inflate it away.

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Yes, or dollars. The U.S. dollar has always been a safe haven. Argentines immediately trade their currency for dollars because dollars suffer from low inflation, comparatively. But dollars won’t be safe haven for long. Me and every central bank around the world can see this… and we’re all preparing financially by doing the exact same thing.

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Spoken like someone who hasn’t had a need for either. My advice for you is very different. Don’t buy gold or guns yet… buy a history book.

Anyway, guns and ammo are good to store as well. They hold their value and they have an obvious additional use. Visit my vault… if you can answer the first question to get in: www.gromicko.com/vault

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No graph can represent the future, we trade on the information in front of us based on the stuff that happened yesterday… Show me just one technical indicator which is flashing inflation dead ahead (let alone hyper-inflation), none exists that I know of and I follow the technicals every week. Gold is a relic, imagine your wealth in gold coins, ludicrous.

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I’d be glad to. The PPI came out today.

The producer price index (PPI) measures inflation from the perspective of costs to companies that produce products, costs that then have to be passed on to their customers.

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While the PPI came in higher than expected, it should be tempered with the fact that energy and food prices drove most of the increase. Both of these are volatile in a month-to-month view.

There is a metric called Core PPI, which excludes food and energy, due to their volatility. That measure was more promising.

That said, inflation is a tough bird to kill. Recovery without a recession is called a soft landing, which is rare and tough to accomplish. As of now, most economists (that I have read) are still leaning towards us pulling one off, possibly. :crossed_fingers:

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When and if I ever get out of the market… I’ll let you all know the day after I sold, till then its risk-on :smile: