You may know me as the guy using weird planetary alignments while assigning proper fundamentals to the gold sector, and recently even doing the same with a somewhat subjective and philosophical view of gold as an important counterweight or insurance component to a sensible portfolio. Or you may know me as the guy who confuses you with too many market indicators or annoys you with too many exposés of the more promotional and/or manipulative entities out there.

Or you may not know me at all…

If that is the case, let me introduce myself. My name is Gary and today I have a very simple post for your consideration. We will look at the now compelling views of the Commitments of Traders (CoT) data for gold and silver. While the prices of the metals are and have been technically bearish and the fundamentals are and have been poor, sentiment (CoT is ultimately a sentiment thing, after all) setups like those shown below should not be ignored. We are talking historic in silver and merely compelling in gold. Continue reading →

Record futures shorts are the best gold and silver buy signals available

Gold and silver were thrashed this past summer, relentlessly pounded to deep new lows. That has fueled extreme bearishness, with traders convinced the precious metals’ fundamentals are rotten. But epic all-time-record futures short selling by speculators was the real culprit. These unprecedented shorts must soon be covered with proportional buying, which is super-bullish for gold and silver prices in the coming months.

Traders generally assume fundamentals drive short-term price action, that real imbalances in supply and demand push prices to market-clearing levels. Unfortunately these core underlying dynamics are heavily distorted in gold and silver. Futures speculators who never own these precious metals are able to wield wildly-disproportional outsized influence over their prices. The main reason is extreme leverage inherent in futures.

Investors usually buy gold and silver outright, paying cash in full. That’s the equivalent of 1x leverage. Every dollar of investment capital deployed in the precious metals provides one dollar of buying power to bid them higher. For many decades in the stock markets, the legal limit to leverage has been 2x. Thus using the leading GLD SPDR Gold Shares gold ETF or SLV iShares Silver Trust ETF, investors can hit 2x. Continue reading →

Despite a strong economy, about 40 percent of American families struggled to meet at least one of their basic needs last year, including paying for food, health care, housing or utilities.

That’s according to an Urban Institute survey of nearly 7,600 adults that found that the difficulties were most prevalent among adults with lower incomes or health issues. But it also revealed that people from all walks of life were running into similar hardships.

The findings issued Tuesday by the nonprofit research organization highlight the financial strains experienced by many Americans in an otherwise strong economy.

The average unemployment rate for 2017 was 4.4 percent, a low that followed years of decline. But having a job doesn’t ensure families will be able to meet their basic needs, said Michael Karpman, one of the study’s authors. Among the households with at least one working adult, more than 30 percent reported hardship. Continue reading →

We’ll be getting back to work over the weekend, but until we do – consider the value of an old silver dollar and what it will buy (due it’s REAL value) to that of a single $1.00 bill.

Hammurabi Knew Better

December 6, 2011 ~ Book V of Aristotle’s Politics describes the eternal transition of oligarchies making themselves into hereditary aristocracies – which end up being overthrown by tyrants or develop internal rivalries as some families decide to “take the multitude into their camp” and usher in democracy, within which an oligarchy emerges once again, followed by aristocracy, democracy, and so on throughout history.

Debt has been the main dynamic driving these shifts – always with new twists and turns. It polarizes wealth to create a creditor class, whose oligarchic rule is ended as new leaders (“tyrants” to Aristotle) win popular support by cancelling the debts and redistributing property or taking its usufruct for the state. Continue reading →