idiot savant

Doug Casey dispels about 20 common reasons not to own gold. Of course, one reason is that Warren Buffett is a huge gold bear. Here is Doug’s excellent response to this view:

This is true, but irrelevant – entirely apart from suffering from the logical fallacy called “argument from authority.” But, nonetheless, when the world’s most successful investor speaks, it’s worth listening. Here's what Buffett recently said about gold in an interview with Ben Stein, another goldphobe: "You could take all the gold that's ever been mined, and it would fill a cube 67 feet in each direction. For what that's worth at current gold prices, you could buy all – not some, all – of the farmland in the United States. Plus, you could buy 10 Exxon Mobils, plus have $1 trillion of walking-around money. Or you could have a big cube of metal. Which would you take? Which is going to produce more value?"

I’ve long considered Buffett an idiot savant – a genius at buying stocks but at nothing else. His statement is quite accurate, but completely meaningless. The same could be said of the U.S. dollar money supply – or even of the world inventory of steel and copper. These things represent potential but are not businesses or productive assets in themselves. Buffett is certainly not stupid, but he’s a shameless and intellectually dishonest sophist. And although a great investor, he’s neither an economist or someone who believes in free markets. ~Casey's Daily Dispatch 2011-0331

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Reasons NOT to buy a house

NOTE: this is copyrighted material ... do not link.

Housing as an Investment
By Vedran Vuk

Here’s an interesting video on Yahoo!Finance of James Altucher from Formula Capital discussing home ownership as an investment. I don’t agree with a lot of his points, but a few are really great insights. Previously, I’ve compared buying a house to investing in the stock market, but Altucher takes it one step further. He notes that buying a house is essentially the opposite of diversifying your portfolio. In very few cases would anyone want to place so much weight on one sector. Second, if an investor wants to play the real estate market, there’s no need to actually purchase properties; the stock market exists for a reason.

Another intriguing point was the use of leverage. One of his interviewers asks what about the people who bought a house for $20,000 in 1970 and made a fortune today. Altucher comes back by saying, well, what if an investor utilized the same amount of leverage to purchase the S&P 500 in 1970. They would have also done really well, if not better.

And third, he points out the risk of owning a home on job mobility. Not only are homes illiquid, but the worse times get, the more illiquid a house becomes. You essentially trap yourself at the worst possible moment. I know a lot of readers underwater on their mortgages are feeling this pain.

However, one of the interviewers makes an interesting point that housing is the only way to get some folks to buy and hold, an interesting thought also.

~Casey's Daily Dispatch 2011-0330

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Hubbartt

Latest update from Morris Hubbartt

USD index 75.90: new lows coming in 2011
Previous lows were:
75.25 March 22, 2011
74.23 November 2009
71.31 July 2008

US citizens: "imagine food and gas at triple the current prices".

Gold 1,432: increase buying toward 1,350
Long term target 4,000

GDXJ 39.00: (taking profits) one year target is 75

GDX 60.00: (taking profits) strong support 55 to 53
one year target is 72

SIVR 37.25: (taking profits) buy zone 33 to 31

Hubbartt's peek

Morris Hubbartt has a gold and stock market update; dated March 18

Main points of interest:

> gold to 1,325 possible (now 1,418)
> GDXJ retest 34.00 to 32.50 (now 36.90)
> GDX retest 55.00 to 52.50 (now 56.66)
> SIVR buy zone: 33.25 to 31.00 (now 34.97)
> SPY: very weak and going lower (now 127.76)
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Billy

Billy Andrusco - Latin Afternoon - Made By Els.
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music

"HOW BIG IS GOD" - featuring: Big John Hall

Big John Hall - The Lighthouse

Wouldn't Take Northin' For My Journey Now (Gaither group)

Who Am I - Gatlin Brothers featuring Tanya Goodman-Sykes
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Cycles

I believe the following quote is in reference to Martin Armstrong's cycles work which pinpoints June 2011 as an important turning point.

Cycles are analyzed by comparing their message to what the market is doing. Cycles are not commands from on high dictating to the markets what they must do.

The answer is what is happening now in the market versus what the cycles call for. The cycle calling for gold to decline into June of 2011 was cancelled by the market’s action of blowing through $1372 and never looking back.

The importance of this analytical approach is that it says without any doubt that the gold price is stronger than any accepted commentator believes.

The normal suspects will throw their blocks, but I assure you at only a waste of good money. The price we have spoken about for a long period $1650 will be low. ~Jim Sinclair

Jesse Livermore

For instance, I had been bullish from the very start of a bull market, and I had backed my opinion by buying stocks. An advance followed, as I had clearly foreseen. So far, all very well. But what else did I do? Why, I listened to the elder statesmen and curbed my youthful impetuousness. I made up my mind to be wise carefully, conservatively. Everybody knew that the way to do that was to take profits and buy back your stocks on reactions. And that is precisely what I did, or rather what I tried to do; for I often took profits and waited for a reaction that never came. And I saw my stock go kitting up ten points more and I sitting there with my four-point profit safe in my conservative pocket. They say you never go broke taking profits. No, you don’t. But neither do you grow rich taking a four-point profit in a bull market.

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