Best Of The Best Share Discussion Threads

[traderabc] 30/12/2009 21:18

SPEC12

Capital Markets
Paulson & Co. Inc.

[traderabc] 30/12/2009 21:15

"We are in danger of being overwhelmed with irredeemable paper; mere paper, representing not gold or silver; no sir, representing nothing but broken promises, bad faith, bankrupt corporations, cheated creditors and ruined people."
-Daniel Webster

[spec12] 30/12/2009 11:45

Anyone know how to invest in Paulson's new Gold Fund from January.

[traderabc] 30/12/2009 10:49

AGRI-FOOD THOUGHTS
by Ned W. Schmidt, CFA, CEBS
Schmidt Management Company
December 29, 2009

Living in Florida, as this author does, often comes with minor problems. As one of the biggest batches of cold, snowy winter storms ravages North America, records of all kinds are being broken. Dallas, as an example, had a white Christmas for the first time in 80 years. But, the UK also has problems. Winter weather there may have damaged the Brussels sprouts crop. Is that not real suffering? Relative to all that, what is our problem in Florida? Cannot remember where we put that pair of socks last year.

We can soon place global warming on the List of Never Happened Forecasts. That list was officially started the day after the Millennium. Also on it is a perennial favorite, going around again, of the imminent collapse of the Chinese economy. U.S. Congress is considering a law that is claimed will reduce the U.S. deficit. On the Never Happen List that goes. And a real favorite on that list is that equities never have a ten-year loss. Perhaps best of a year ago was that commodity investing was dead.

[traderabc] 30/12/2009 10:38

Finally some good news...


Firms move production back to UK



Many UK firms have outsourced production in the past decade


Manufacturers are moving production back to the UK amid concerns about poor quality and higher freight costs, a report has said.

One in seven companies has moved its manufacturing operations to the UK from abroad in the past two years, a report by the EEF and accountants BDO said.

The EEF said the UK had become "increasingly competitive and efficient" over the past few years.

The EEF represents thousands of manufacturing companies in the UK.

"Many companies have taken advantage of the low-cost emerging markets, both as market opportunities and also as a means of reducing costs," the EEF's chief economist Lee Hopley told the BBC.

"If you look at how UK manufacturers compete in global markets, it's about quality, it's about customer service and it's about delivery times.

"If lower labour cost producers can't provide what they need when they need it, then the alternative is to produce in-house and bring production back to the UK, which some are clearly doing."

[traderabc] 30/12/2009 10:22

Stock market falls force investor rethink

By Jamie Robertson
Business presenter, BBC World News



In the heady closing days of 1999 and early months of 2000, had you muttered that in 10 years the FTSE would be 25% lower and that a tracker fund would actually lose a quarter of your money over the coming decade, you would be regarded as the kind of oddball who thought China would become an economic superpower and the US might elect a black president.

The truth is there really was precious little evidence to support your view. Certainly there was a fair amount of agreement that the dot.com bubble would burst - but a loss over ten years?

That sort of thing only happened in deflationary Japan. The market had been on a bull run from 1982, excepting a slight hiccough in 1987, and climbing resolutely through the recession of the early 1990s.

Seventeen years of continual profits were enough to convince most players that shares guaranteed anything from 7% to 15% annual real returns.

Well, as we now know, they didn't.

[traderabc] 29/12/2009 12:48

Kill The Bloggers


YOUR NEW REALITY
Tuesday, Dec 29th, 2009

Another mainstream media story, this time from the New York Times, pushing the new reality where news consumers will supposedly have to soon start paying digital cash to read stories, columns and watch news video online. I’ve been reading about this for getting onto two years, and and it seems no closer to reality. Not much new in this story, but this final quote says it all about the biggest problem Old Media dinosaurs like Rupert Murdoch face :

“One of the problems is newspapers fired so many journalists and turned them loose to start so many blogs. They should have executed them. They wouldn’t have had competition. But they foolishly let them out alive.”

Too many bloggers and citizen journos willing to work for free.

For paid news content to work, and to generate the kinds of profits that media empires were once built on, the majors will have to eliminate the competition, including thousands of non-professional bloggers and ex-journos, who still want to keep writing, regardless of how justly or unjustly they are compensated for their work and effort.

Of course, Rupert Murdoch could stop paying himself and his family tens of millions of dollars a year, and eliminate one of the biggest costs of mega-corporate media : paying the massive executive salaries of those who don't do any journalism any at all.

[traderabc] 29/12/2009 12:45

ShadowStats.com Founder John Williams Explains the Risk of Hyperinflation


cryptogon.com
Sunday, Dec 27th, 2009

Via: Fairfield Weekly:

What can we do to avoid hyperinflation? What if we just shut down the Fed or something like that?

[traderabc] 29/12/2009 12:42

NY Times’ Krugman Sees ‘Reasonably High Chance’ Economy Will Contract


ABC News
Monday, Dec 28th, 2009

“The things we know about are all gonna be negative in the second half of next year.”

[traderabc] 29/12/2009 12:31

& then there's the the counter view..


Olive: Don't believe hype over gold
Investing zealots betting the precious metal will top $15,000 U.S. an ounce in the years to come will see their bubble burst – again
By David Olive
Business Columnist
Published On Sun, 27 Dec 2009


For the second time in 30 years, we're in the midst of a classic gold bubble.

There are "gold parties" akin to Tupperware parties across the U.S., where people trade in their gold jewellery and even gold dental fillings for cash.

"Goldbugs," the term for gold-investing zealots, are predicting a gold price of $2,000 (all figures U.S.) per ounce next year. And a rise to as high as $15,000 in years to come – a 15-fold increase over the modern-day record price of $1,086 set on Dec. 3, from which gold has since retreated 11 per cent.

[traderabc] 29/12/2009 00:43

Jim Rogers on Gold Silver Cotton Coffee and other Commodities


Gold should be over $2000 by now says Jim Rogers

"If you adjust Gold for inflation and go back to it’s former all-time high in 1980, Gold should be over $2,000 an ounce right now if you want to say it’s reaching new inflation adjusted all-time highs. That does not mean Gold has to get back to a true all-time high. Nothing has to. However, I suspect that given all the money printing in the world, we will see much higher prices for hard assets.
Despite Gold’s potential, I think I will make more money in other commodities such as silver, cotton, or coffee — all of which are terribly depressed."said Jim Rogers in a recent interview with Businesswire

[traderabc] 29/12/2009 00:15

Thanks for your take on the Gold charts chestnuts. When it comes to calling this sector, I suspect I'm somewhat 'emotionally' compromised and perhaps unrealistic with a final target. What I'm sure of is that precious metals are in a strong (long term) bull market. I don't believe they're in a bubble situation.

[chestnuts] 28/12/2009 23:03

Trader abc
I must thank you for all your effort you put in on your thread very enjoyable reading
I think gold as bottomed as its bounced off the trend line which goes back to 1980 when the price touched 876

[traderabc] 28/12/2009 20:31

Pro, how a bit of both? This one is (imo) safer then an ETF, especially a silver EFT. Do you remember what happened to LME Nickel a few years ago? The longs got forced to liquidate and lost their (longer term) positions. The same ought to happen with Silver one day.

[pro_better] 28/12/2009 19:33

i am going to buy silver ETF. It seems Rogers is more bullish on silver than gold. anyone care to share some good plays on silver?

[traderabc] 28/12/2009 18:54

Dec 28 Gold Bull has many years, thousands of dollars to go

pdf

[traderabc] 28/12/2009 18:53

Good article, for what it's worth I think this guy may well be right, gold could pull back to it's (strong) support at $1000, if this comes to be, it is even possible for gold to (very temporarily) spike below $1K (inter-day) just to wrong foot as many as possible. $1k support should hold on the weekly chart, then I'd be hoping for $1600 within a year.
If this event does occur, it could well be the last chance to buy (cheap) gold in our lifetimes. The fundamentals are better then they were in the 70s, the charts are blatantly bullish, the inherent risk from the US$ is widely perceived, fiat currencies illusory 'value' is being questioned, there is defiantly a long term structural 'change' taking place in this fragile global economy, it is very hard to argue that it is for the better..


Just Like the Old Days

Howard S. Katz
Dec 28, 2009



Today we stand on the threshold of one of the great moves in financial history. The signal comes as what is called a pullback to support. It will be my goal in this article to convey to you the immense power of such a formation. So simple, yet fraught with such potential for profit.

The best way to understand pullback to support is to go back in history and see where it has happened before. In this regard, we are very fortunate because the all-time greatest buy point in gold, in the summer of 1970, occurred as a pullback to support. This is depicted in the chart above. The price of gold was set at $35/oz. in 1935 (by the U.S. Government) and remained exactly the same for 32 years. Then in 1968 it broke out to the upside.



Price of Gold 1935 to 1970



Gold 2007 till present

[dutch alert] 27/12/2009 15:55

Food for thought - China continues to keep the renmimbi stable against the dollar.

In my opinion it shows the weakness of China. They need its exportmarkets and the
US is essential for China. So if the dollar goes down, as often spread on this
board, what will happen with China. I guess they will also go down and create
such a cheap export it will mean a big problem, not only for the US but also for the rest of the world.

[traderabc] 27/12/2009 12:20

ARE WE MISSING SOMETHING?
- The Casey Files -
by Olivier Garret
CEO, Casey Research
December 23, 2009

Ben Bernanke is a dubious choice to be named “Person of the Year” by Time magazine. While Time’s Managing Editor Richard Stengel credits him with recognizing early and reacting appropriately to the ongoing financial crisis, in reality, he was wrong time and again with both his predictions and his remedies. Just remember these gems:
On July 1, 2005, Bernanke stated without hesitation that we were not experiencing a housing bubble: “I think what is more likely is that house prices will slow, maybe stabilize, might slow consumption spending a bit.”
November 2005, on derivatives: “With respect to their safety, derivatives, for the most part, are traded among very sophisticated financial institutions and individuals who have considerable incentive to understand them and to use them properly.” And “the Federal Reserve’s responsibility is to make sure that the institutions it regulates have good systems and good procedures for ensuring that their derivatives portfolios are well managed and do not create excessive risk in their institutions.”
February 15, 2006: “Housing markets are cooling a bit. Our expectation is that the decline in activity or the slowing in activity will be moderate, that house prices will probably continue to rise.”
February 2008: “I expect there will be some failures of smaller banks” (Bear Stearns collapsed a couple of weeks later).
But then again, I guess in regards to his nomination we are talking about achievements in 2009. That was the year Bernanke said, "Currently, we don’t think [the unemployment rate] will get to 10 percent."

[traderabc] 27/12/2009 11:07

"I would buy every three months some gold and not worry so much about the price because the weight stays the same." -Marc FaberAn Introspective Look at the Future of America



Craig Harris
earthblognews
Dec 27, 2009

As we close out 2009 and look forward into 2010 and beyond, this has been a year of near financial catastrophe and monumental change, none of which benefited America or ordinary Americans. Late in 2008 and throughout 2009, events have happened in the US which would have been labeled unfathomable just a few short years ago, and yet already these monumental changes are expected to be filed into the memory hole and Americans are expected to believe nothing has changed.

As we exit the year, we are told the US is a laissez-faire free market economy and yet the US government is now the largest owner of housing in the US as well as the owner of last resort for some of the largest and completely insolvent US corporations. The Federal Reserve, a privately and anonymously owned and controlled corporation chartered with issuing the nations currency, were given the green light by themselves to transfer to themselves and their shareholders the people's wealth in the form of their future labor.

[traderabc] 26/12/2009 15:38

We're Screwed!
ShadowStats.com founder John Williams explains the risk of hyperinflation. Worst-case scenario? Rioting in the streets and devolution to a bartering system.

Thursday, December 31, 2009



By Phil Maymin
Courtesy of John Williams

Economist/statistician John Williams shifts through the government’s rose-tinted data


Do you believe everything the government tells you? Economist and statistician John Williams sure doesn't. Williams, who has consulted for individuals and Fortune 500 companies, now uncovers the truth behind the U.S. government's economic numbers on his Web site at ShadowStats.com. Williams says, over the last several decades, the feds have been infusing their data with optimistic biases to make the economy seem far rosier than it really is. His site reruns the numbers using the original methodology. What he found was not good.



Maymin: So we are technically bankrupt?

Williams: Yes, and when countries are in that state, what they usually do is rev up the printing presses and print the money they need to meet their obligations. And that creates inflation, hyperinflation, and makes the currency worthless.