Tag: Warren Buffet

Hats off to Barrick

I don’t believe in the health of the stock market at large. It has further to fall in my opinion. Nationally it seems we are being feed the idea that the worst is behind us in terms of this financial crisis, and that reassuring message seems to have gotten people back into the stock market. It’s a classic suckers rally that is only going to end badly for investors. Paradoxically, the modern investment mantra of “stocks for the long haul” and using diversity as a means of protection is just going to guarantee that the average investor will feel the full weight of this next leg downward. Gold, on the other hand, has a bright future.

I’ve made a great deal of money trading shares of Barrick Gold (ticker symbol ABX) over the past twelve months. It’s a company I follow quite closely. I feel its one of the few great investments available in the stock market as it allows for you to gain leveraged exposure to the rising gold price while at the same time holding a stock that is paying you dividends. While the oblivious investors of the world are foolishly plowing their money into stock market index funds without the slightest clue as to the fundamentals of their underlying investment, I believe, as Henry Ford did (and Warren Buffet does) that its perfectly alright to put all your eggs in one basket provided that you “watch that basket.” Barrick is my egg basket and I watch it quite closely.

Earlier in the year, I took apart their financial projections and put it into an Excel spreadsheet. My own estimate as to what the company would earn was Continue reading Hats off to Barrick

Gold Mining or Gold Bullion for 2009?

Given the massive amount of money being pumped into the global economic system, higher prices down the road are a given. It’s possible that prices may fall in the short term, but no currency can withstand a determined onslaught by its own central bank and national government for long. I consider gold a no brainer in this environment. It’s a store of value that does well both in inflationary times and, as we saw last year, in deflationary times.   

But I’m not content just to park my money in physical gold and leave it at that. The trader in me wants to make a leveraged play to make the most off of gold’s bright future. Gold mining shares would seem an excellent play then. Not only do you get exposure to the gold market, but you get the benefits of stock ownership. In the past, whenever I would introduce the idea of owning gold as a form of investment, people would laugh my suggestion off because they just couldn’t imagine how anything would be better than owning “stocks for the long run.” Of course, they aren’t saying that anymore. 

Gold mining shares are a nice compromise in terms of investment philosophy. If the American dollar does fall from grace as we goldbugs suggest then owning shares of a gold mining company will be a tremendous boon. If the dollar continues to stubbornly hang on, and we somehow manage to resume normal economic growth, then I still own equities and should get the traditional benefits of equity appreciation. Continue reading Gold Mining or Gold Bullion for 2009?

Exploring the Myths of the Consumer Driven Economy: Part III

In the previous blogs of this series, I have laid down some basic fundamental definitions for things such as assets and liabilities. In the second post in the series, we saw how the banks serve as the inflationary engines of society, but that their activity does not add to the fundamentals level of assets in a society. Instead, banks expand the monetary base by creating and loaning far more money into circulation that they could actually deliver were their depositors to demand it; banks thereby create situations whereby there are far more claims to the amount of real goods in society then there are actual goods which leads to inflation.

As banks create and loan out money the economy booms, but it is an unsustainable growth. It is caused because the market misinterprets the source of the amount of money flowing into their products and services as a genuine increase in demand as opposed to simply a credit induced event. This leads business to expand their operations in an effort to make more profit, but the problem is that they are responding to false/credit induced demand as opposed to genuine demand. Eventually things have to revert back to fundamentals, and that is when the bubble collapses. 

Now lets take these tools and bring them to bear on our current situation. Continue reading Exploring the Myths of the Consumer Driven Economy: Part III