Anyone willing to wager a million bucks that the gold price will fall below $1,000 before it passes $2,000 has a taker. It’s no gimmick, it’s a genuine offer to gold bears to “put your money where your mouth is.” The man behind the challenge, Peter Grandich, is not your typical economist. He holds no degree from any Ivy League college. Actually, he couldn’t even make it through high school. Yet in less than three… Read More

To better understand the gold price and make sound investment decisions, it pays to listen to all sides of every relevant debate. A post in Seeking Alpha with the blunt title “Don’t Bet On Gold” recently caught my attention. After a mocking dress down of the gold investment industry the author enumerated his reasons why it would “be wise to consider” before buying at today’s gold prices. Reason #1. “The supply of gold is not… Read More

The most overworked comment about the recent slump in the gold price is that gold has lost all of its gains in 2012. But what does that mean? Did somebody open up a safe deposit box and discover that a few coins and bars were missing? Of course not. The gold in that box, assuming none had been sold or bought, is precisely the same amount that was there at the beginning of the year…. Read More

When the gold price fell below $1600 yesterday you could hear “I told you so!” echoing up and down Wall Street as once more the pundits rushed in to pronounce the end of gold’s run. Balderdash. First, consider what really happened: by the end of the session the gold price had fallen a bit more than 1.5%. That’s considerable, but far from catastrophic. The response of serious gold investors was Pavlovian, not one of panic,… Read More

The gold price is out of whack and the markets know it. A recent post by Simit Patel on Seeking Alpha gives us an idea of how far out of whack it has become. Patel’s discussion is about where on the gold price trajectory he would start thinking “sell.” Patel mentions the work of James Turk and Jim Sinclair, who independently estimated the price of gold has to be in excess of $11,000 to cancel… Read More

Gold traders are getting impatient with the sluggish performance of the gold price, and they are leaving the market in growing numbers. “A very robust wall of worry is being built,” says Mark Hulbert in MarketWatch. That wall should be anything but worrisome to individual investors. When gold investor sentiment falls, market timers go heavy on short positions – they gamble that prices will keep falling. Hulbert’s Hulbert Gold Newsletter Sentiment Index (HGNSI) has been… Read More

Last week the gold price finally showed some signs of yielding to the fundamentals. With the recovery sluggish at best and demand sharply on the rise, the current price of gold simply cannot be sustained. In a Sprott Asset Management commentary, Eric Sprott & David Baker give us some insight as to how far out of kilter the gold price has become. “What would happen if a single country came in from nowhere and increased… Read More

As was to be expected, the reaction of the gold price to Wednesday’s FOMC report was just another jerk of the knee. In a three-hour period straddling the press conference gold prices dropped $10, sat there for 30 minutes or so, shot up $15, dropped another $10, then rebounded to finish off the day as if nothing ever happened. That’s because nothing did. Thursday, reality struck. No news, it would seem, is bad news. So… Read More

Has the gold price really seen its better days? That’s the impression the Wall Street Journal gives in this recent subheading: Demand for Gold is Easing Amid Signs that the U.S. Economy is Stabilizing; Twelve-Year Rally Under Threat. Sounds pretty ominous, if you accept the premise that the economy is stabilizing. The article is quick to point out that “gold is down 7% from its peak for the year in late February.” Oh, no! Say… Read More

Ever wonder why there’s so much ballyhoo about the price of gold signifying the end of a bubble? From here it looks like a smokescreen to keep our eyes off the real bubble, one that’s set to burst in a spectacular fashion. If you think that Dodds-Frank has derivatives under control, then the smokescreen is a huge success. In truth, the unabashedly crooked tables at the derivative casino have cranked up the stakes to unimaginable… Read More