ALWAYS CONSULT YOUR INVESTMENT PROFESSIONAL BEFORE MAKING ANY INVESTMENT DECISION
April 28, 2025 | Recession Watch: Real Estate Is Already There
As always, when it comes to real estate, Wolf Richter’s analysis and charts are very helpful. Let’s take the office building story step-by-step: Between 2010 and 2020, millions of square feet of office space were financed with unnaturally cheap credit. During the pandemic, millions of Americans discovered that they prefer working from home and refused to return […]
April 27, 2025 | Health Prepping: Seed Oils Are Poison
Seed oils are getting a lot of bad press, so I’ve been reading ingredient lists with them in mind. The results are heartbreaking. Things that seemed healthy have turned out, thanks to their reliance on seed oils, to fall into the “heavily processed, do not eat” category. A couple of examples: This Thai curry paste […]
April 25, 2025 | More Tales From the Gold Bull Market: Earnings Beats and High-Premium M&A
Agnico Eagle, generally seen as the best-run senior gold miner, just reported blow-out earnings: Agnico Eagle Smashes Q1 Expectations with Record Earnings and Soaring Gold Prices (Kitco News) – Another quarterly earnings report means another record broken for Canada’s largest gold producer. On Thursday, after the North American equity close, Agnico Eagle Mines Limited (NYSE: […]
April 22, 2025 | Mining is Hard: The End of the Cobre Panama Story?
Once-favorable mining jurisdictions are becoming battlegrounds, adding a new layer of risk to an already challenging business. The most ominous example of this trend is the Cobre Panama copper mine, on which one of our portfolio’s royalty companies had bet big. See: Just How Bad Was Franco-Nevada’s Bad News? Franco-Nevada Takes Its Cobre Panama Hit The mine’s […]
April 21, 2025 | How to Judge Those Gold Miner “Free Cash Flow” Numbers
We’re entering the age of free cash flow (FCF), in which gold miners start trumpeting the size and growth of this metric in every public utterance. So we’ll need an analytical tool for judging whose FCF — and by implication, stock — is most valuable. Resourceful Insights’ George Billman just posted a quick way to put a […]
April 20, 2025 | Gold Is Becoming “Monetary Infrastructure”
Why is gold marching steadily higher while everything else is trading chaotically? An X thread from @mcm_ct_usa offers a useful— and for gold bugs, very exciting —explanation. Here’s a condensed version: Gold is quietly being re-monetized—and most people don’t see it. Here’s what’s happening, why it matters, and why it’s not priced in. This is for anyone […]
April 16, 2025 | Poetic Justice For Private Equity
Private equity, like so many other Wall Street “innovations,” is a benign-sounding idea that has morphed into a kind of financial cancer. Let’s see if it kills the patient. First, the concept: Private equity refers to the practice of rich guys pooling their money and hunting for companies to buy. Once they get one, they […]
April 15, 2025 | Health Prepping: Did AI Just Cut Cancer Risk by 90%?
Artificial intelligence promises a lot of things. And sometimes it delivers. One possible case in point: Doctors Justus R. Hope and Paul E. Marik specialize in finding new uses for existing drugs, and recently asked an AI to look through all available studies (something way beyond the abilities of human researchers) involving supplements’ impact on cancer risk. […]
April 14, 2025 | Confused? Join the Club: Inflation Plunges While Inflation Expectations Spike
Talk about cross-currents. Oil, which affects the cost of pretty much everything, is down about 15% so far this month. That’s extremely deflationary. Housing, meanwhile, is right up there with oil for its impact on the cost of living. And home price inflation is rapidly headed for zero overall, with many formerly hot markets already […]
April 13, 2025 | Time to Take Profits in Gold Mining Stocks? Jim Rickards Says Not Yet
Suddenly, gold miner shareholders have the problem everyone wants: They’ve made fairly serious recent money and now must decide whether to convert some of their paper profits to cash. Anyone who’s been round-tripped in a big position understands how serious this question is. Jim Rickards, author of a series of best-selling investment books, just weighed […]
April 10, 2025 | Gold Miners: Great Q1 Earnings Coming
We’re heading into another earnings season, and with gold outperforming pretty much everything else, this one is looking even better for the miners than Q4. For context, here’s the XAU gold/silver miners index for the past six months. Note the nice run that started when excellent Q4 miner earnings combined with a rising gold price: And for […]
April 8, 2025 | Watch the Gold/Silver Ratio
Just a quick reminder that in times of market stress, gold and silver will sometimes diverge, with gold catching a safe haven bid and silver selling off as a cyclical industrial commodity. During such times, silver can get very cheap relative to gold, an imbalance that’s usually rectified by silver outperforming for a while. This […]
April 6, 2025 | Deflation Watch: Cheaper Oil = Cheaper Everything = Plunging Interest Rates
This post’s title sketches out a formula that ends with the world’s governments panic-printing their currencies. To flesh out the thesis, let’s start with energy’s impact on our cost of living: Energy Is In Everything Pretty much all of life’s necessities have an energy component. A car, for instance, requires electricity and petrochemicals to build […]
April 4, 2025 | How Do We Play This Bear Market?
Pretty much every “buy” recommendation in this newsletter has come with a version of this caveat: We’re in the late stages of a long credit expansion, which means a potentially brutal recession and/or bear market is likely imminent. So approach these stocks with caution. Don’t jump in all at once. Instead, add to positions in […]
April 3, 2025 | What Just Happened? Part 1: Gold and Silver Fall Hard
Gold and silver are being pulled down by a general equities bear market this morning. That’s not surprising, but the details are interesting. Some background: Rush to get gold to the U.S. halts abruptly with tariff exemption (Bloomberg) – A massive arbitrage trade that has drawn tens of billions of dollars’ worth of gold and […]
April 1, 2025 | Art of the Collapse, April 2025
Two strange and unprecedented things (“scandals,” “outrages” — it’s hard to know what to call them) are triggering meme-makers as this is written. First, Elon Musk morphed from industrialist to government efficiency crusader, in the process enraging the segment of the population that owns Teslas, leading them to … vandalize Teslas: The other thing was that government […]
March 30, 2025 | Seven Charts That Put the Gold Bull Market in Context
Remember that long, boring stretch where gold couldn’t break resistance at $2,000/oz? Here it is in the context of this century’s bull market — note the definitive breakout in early 2024. What’s driving the bull market? Central bank buying. And what’s driving that? Geopolitics. Emerging market central banks started planning for a post-dollar world when the Ukraine […]
March 24, 2025 | Recession Watch: Cratering Condos and Creeped-Out Consumers
Most of the following charts are from Wolf Street or the Kobeissi letter. Definitely follow those guys. Cratering Condos There’s no way to overstate how crazy US home prices have become. To take just one metric, the median US household income is $79,200, but it takes an annual income of $124,200 to buy the average American house. That’s […]
March 23, 2025 | $3,000 Gold = Gold Miner Acquisition Binge
Gold hit $3,000/oz last week. I’ve been waiting a long time to write that sentence! Now get ready for a torrent of gold miner cash flow to ignite a takeover boom. Mining analyst Marin Katusa just posted some thoughts on what this means. Here’s an excerpt: Gold Miners, the New Margin Monsters Most gold mines have costs […]
March 21, 2025 | Is Silver Being Suppressed?
Bubble Bubble Report’s Jesse Colombo just weighed in on the “Why isn’t silver $100!?” debate with a compelling case for manipulation. Here’s an excerpt: The mechanics of silver price suppression Many precious metals investors have heard about silver manipulation or suspected it, but few fully understand how it works or can clearly explain it. Many also […]
March 20, 2025 | Health Prepping: Stop Poisoning Yourself
Back in the nutritional Dark Ages, my wife and I would take our kids to McDonald’s and give them a choice of Sprite or Coke with their burgers and fries. We didn’t know at the time that the whole menu was just empty calories. Sorry kids! But it’s way worse than that. This is the […]
March 17, 2025 | The MSM Discovers Copper
Copper has had a quietly impressive run so far in 2025. But much more is coming as mainstream investors tune into the story. Consider this, from NPR of all places: Forget about rare earth minerals. We need more copper (NPR) – In recent weeks, you’ve likely heard a lot about rare-earth substances, thanks to President Trump’s stalled […]
March 16, 2025 | Nomi Prins: Time to Buy the Uranium Dip
Nomi Prins just posted an explanation for the uranium miners’ recent correction, and why it’s a buying opportunity for those who missed the previous big run. Here’s an excerpt: Why NOW is the Time for Uranium Here’s the latest outlook on uranium and what you need to know about the factors impacting its price. As we round […]
March 14, 2025 | Civil War in the UK?
I just watched a disturbingly plausible video about the rising odds of a UK civil war. The source is David Betz, a professor of “war in the modern world” at King’s College, London. He recently published an article titled Civil War Comes to the West in Military Strategy Magazine, in which he claimed that multiculturalism and mass immigration […]
March 12, 2025 | Gold Porn, Part 2: It’s a Real Bull Market
Gold (and now silver) are starting to do things not seen for over a decade. And the resulting charts are just gorgeous. Some recent examples: Foreign central banks are moving out of US Treasuries and into gold: Overindebted countries are cranking the money printing up to panic levels: Gold and silver are responding with identical […]