Investment Contrarian Guest Post The connection between economic growth and the stock market, best represented by the S&P 500, is a complicated affair. Many investors mistakenly believe that both need to be moving in the exact same direction at the exact same time. But nothing could be further from the truth. For evidence, take a…
Richard Whalen Richard Whalen’s interview snippet with Henry Smyth of Granville Cooper Asset Management Ltd. (GCAM). Henry is a former Coutts & Co. banker and a very astute observer of the global financial markets. RCW: Henry, the gold market has been taking a beating in the past few months. What do you see as the…
Earlier in the week I posted a chart, which indicated a possible Head and Shoulders pattern forming on the Dow. This fitted in line with my view that a major top is in place for US indices and the next significant move will be down. With the outlook for American QE having changed considerably since…
With gold now below its weighted average cash cost and rapidly approaching its marginal cash cost (see chart below) cnsolidation is likely to be kicked off in earnest over the next several months so choose your picks carefully – low EV/Reserves base measures and cash backed balance sheets will be top of our pick list…
Hedging is a controversial topic, probably as controversial as any I have written about. Nevertheless, I want to share my thoughts and hopefully add something new to the topic. It is general knowledge that the gold miners had adopted hedging during the long years when the gold price was moving sideways to downwards, culminating in…
After years printing money, it seems that the press at the US FED are finally running out of ink with “Helicopter” Ben Bernanke announcing last week that the party will be over by mid 2014. The seeming everlasting QE program will begin to be scaled back this year as the US central bank looks to…
If you remember the beginning of the Lehman Brothers collapse that led to the credit crunch in 2007 which led to the FED’s policies of using QE-bazookas, you’ll no doubt be experiencing a deja vu sensation when looking at China in recent weeks. The economy, which averaged a 9.3% GDP growth rate between 1970 and…
As most of us will be aware, until the financial crisis of 2007 – 8 (caused in my opinion because the Euro was becoming too successful as an alternative to the U.S. Dollar / T Bonds for (non) tax paid cash syphoned from emerging markets) even a chimp with a pin and a copy of…
In an interview on CNBC, John Boehner, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, accused Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke of generating the market sell-off. In fact, Mr. Boehner actually should’ve thanked Bernanke for the stock market rally that drove the Dow and S&P 500 to record highs. It was only because of the…
We thought it useful to look back at previous serious gold stock drubbings to see just how the current rout compares. Take a look at the chart below of the Barrons Gold Mining Index and you can see that the current rout (in black) has just about reached the depths seen in the 1974-76 downturn…
