A Most Dangerous Era

By John Mauldin

"In the economic sphere an act, a habit, an institution, a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen; we are fortunate if we foresee them.

"There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.

"Yet this difference is tremendous; for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the later consequences are disastrous, and vice versa. Whence it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good that will be followed by a great evil to come, while the good economist pursues a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil."

– From an essay by Frédéric Bastiat in 1850, "That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Unseen"

The devil is in the details, we are told, and the details are often buried in an appendix or footnote. This week we were confronted with a rather troubling appendix in the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis of the Affordable Care Act, which suggests that the act will have a rather profound impact on employment patterns. You could tell a person's political leaning by how they responded. Republicans jumped all over this. The conservative Washington Times, for instance, featured this headline: "Obamacare will push 2 million workers out of labor market: CBO." Which is not what the analysis says at all. Liberals immediately downplayed the import by suggesting that all it really said was that people will have more choice about how they work, giving them more free time to play with their kids and pets and pursue other activities. Who could be against spending more time with your children?

Paul Krugman noted that the data means that potential GDP will be reduced by as much as 0.5% per year, which he dismissed as a small number. And he states that people voluntarily reducing their work hours does not have the same economic effect as people being laid off or fired. Which is true, but not the point nor the import of that pesky little appendix.

Where Will the Jobs Come From?

To me the economic and employment effects of Obamacare are another piece of the larger puzzle called Where Will the Jobs Come From? This may be the most important economic question of the next 30 years. Because this topic has been the focus of my thinking for the past few years, I could be reading more into the CBO's report than I should, but indulge me as I make a few points and then see if I can tie them together in the end.

First let's look at what the report actually said. The CBO stated that the implementation of the Affordable Care Act will result in a "substantially larger" and "considerably higher" reduction in the labor force than the "mere" 800,000 the budget office estimated in 2010. The overall level of labor will fall by 1.5% to 2% over the decade, the CBO figures. The revision was evidently driven by economic work done by a professor at the University of Chicago by the name of Casey Mulligan. (When you do a little research on Professor Mulligan and look past the multitude of honors and awards, you find people calling him the antithesis of Paul Krugman. I must therefore state for the record that I already like him.) For you economics wonks, there is a very interesting interview with Professor Mulligan in the weekend Wall Street Journal. For those who don't go there, I will summarize and quote a few salient points.

Let's be clear. This report and Mulligan's research do not say Obamacare destroys jobs. What they suggest is that Obamacare raises the marginal tax rates on income, and to such an extent that it reduces the rewards for working more hours for marginally higher pay at certain income levels. The chart below does not pertain to upper-income individuals but rather to those at the median income level.



What Mulligan's work does demonstrate is that the loss of government benefits has the same effect on an individual as a tax increase. If you lose a government subsidy because you work more hours, then for all intents and purposes it is the same as if you were taxed at a higher rate. Quoting now from the WSJ piece:

Instead, liberals have turned to claiming that ObamaCare's missing workers will be a gift to society. Since employers aren't cutting jobs per se through layoffs or hourly take-backs, people are merely choosing rationally to supply less labor. Thanks to ObamaCare, we're told, Americans can finally quit the salt mines and blacking factories and retire early, or spend more time with the children, or become artists.

Mr. Mulligan reserves particular scorn for the economists making this "eliminated from the drudgery of labor market" argument, which he views as a form of trahison des clercs [loosely translated, "the betrayal of academic economists" – JM]. "I don't know what their intentions are," he says, choosing his words carefully, "but it looks like they're trying to leverage the lack of economic education in their audience by making these sorts of points."

A job, Mr. Mulligan explains, "is a transaction between buyers and sellers. When a transaction doesn't happen, it doesn't happen. We know that it doesn't matter on which side of the market you put the disincentives, the results are the same.... In this case you're putting an implicit tax on work for households, and employers aren't willing to compensate the households enough so they'll still work." Jobs can be destroyed by sellers (workers) as much as buyers (businesses).

He adds: "I can understand something like cigarettes and people believe that there's too much smoking, so we put a tax on cigarettes, so people smoke less, and we say that's a good thing. OK. But are we saying we were working too much before? Is that the new argument? I mean make up your mind. We've been complaining for six years now that there's not enough work being done.... 

Even before the recession there was too little work in the economy. Now all of a sudden we wake up and say we're glad that people are working less? We're pursuing our dreams?" The larger betrayal, Mr. Mulligan argues, is that the same economists now praising the great shrinking workforce used to claim that ObamaCare would expand the labor market.

Paul Krugman interprets the CBO estimates to mean a loss of the number of hours that would be equivalent to the loss of 2 million jobs. The Wall Street Journal sees that same number as equivalent to 2.5 million jobs. Professor Mulligan's research suggests that they are still off by a factor of two and that it could be closer to 5 million job equivalents.

That means a drop in potential GDP growth of somewhere between 0.5% and 1% per year. A small price to pay for universal healthcare, suggests Krugman. I would personally see it as a large price to pay for structuring healthcare reform the wrong way. That we need healthcare reform and that we as a country want it to be universal is clear. But the CBO report makes it evident that there is a hidden economic cost to the country in the way healthcare reform is currently structured. Dismissing potential GDP growth loss of 0.5% per year as "not all that much" is simply not intellectually sufficient.

(And that is taking Krugman's estimate of 0.5% to be the actual negative effect. There are other economists who can produce credible estimates that are much higher, but for the purposes of this letter Krugman's lower estimate will do.)

Doug Henwood over at The Liscio Report produced some fascinating research this week on what it has meant for our economy to be growing at a lower rate since 2007. In another report, the CBO offered its own estimate of future growth, which the normally sanguine Henwood thinks has the potential to make us complacent. Let's jump right to his impact paragraphs (emphasis mine):

Another way to measure where GDP is relative to where it "should" be is by comparing the actual level to its long-term trend. [That's what's graphed below.] This technique shows the economy in a much deeper hole than the CBO does.

By this method, actual GDP at the end of 2013 was 86.7% of its trend value. That's actually 3 points below where it was when the recession ended. Consumption was 87.4% of its trend value; investment, 75.1%; and government, 84.5%. (Note that government, despite perceptions to the contrary, has been falling, not rising, relative to its trend.)

These are huge gaps. In nominal dollar terms, per capita GDP is $8,278 below its 1970–2007 trend. Using the CBO's less dramatic gap estimate works out to an actual per capita GDP $2,141 below its potential. Either way, that's a lot of money. One way of reconciling the $6,137 disparity between the figures derived from CBO's method and the trend method is by pointing to the long-term economic damage done by the financial crisis and recession.

The hit to investment, productivity, and labor force participation is enormous and long-lived. To put that $6,137 number in perspective, it's very close to the per capita GDP of China. That is not small, and if the CBO is even half right, it's not going away any time soon.

By the way, Casey Mulligan argues in his 2012 book, The Redistribution Recession, that the expansion of the welfare state through the surge in food stamps, unemployment benefits, disability, Medicaid, and other safety-net programs was responsible for about half the drop in work hours since 2007, and possibly more.

The CBO is de facto admitting that the increase in the entitlement spending due to Obamacare is going to reduce GDP. If Mulligan's larger projection is right, we could lose roughly 10% of GDP potential over the next decade. That means the pie in the future will be smaller by 10%. That is a huge difference, not an inconsequential one. It means tax revenues needed to pay for government benefits will be 10% smaller. I am not arguing for or against whether such benefits are a proper expenditure of money; I'm simply saying that we cannot ignore the economic consequences simply because they may be politically inconvenient.

Think about this for a moment. We have lost the equivalent of Chinese per-person GDP in the space of seven years as a result of policy choices made by both Republican and Democratic administrations and due to the financial repression visited upon us by the Federal Reserve – which, by the way, has created multiple bubbles. The way we structure our policy decisions has consequences beyond the obvious.

More Unintended Consequences

Rather than immediately jumping to some kind of conclusion on employment that simply offers a number and doesn't offer insight, I want us to look at the larger picture of work and what we get paid for it. We are rightly concerned in the developed world about the concentration of income and wealth in the top fraction of the population. When 85 people own 46% of the world's wealth, as we've repeatedly heard the past few weeks, what does this portend for the future?

To continue reading this article from Thoughts from the Frontline – a free weekly publication by John Mauldin, renowned financial expert, best-selling author, and Chairman of Mauldin Economics – Please Click Here.

Posted courtesy of our trading partner John Mauldin at Thoughts from the Frontline

International Buying & Your Shot at 1,000% Gains

By Jeff Clark, Senior Precious Metals Analyst

 

As a gold investor in North America, it sometimes feels like I'm living in some far off land where everyone believes in fairy tales and unicorns.


Most people around me don't seem to see anything wrong with the Fed creating $65 billion a month out of thin air, hey, it's not $85 billion anymore, what a relief! It's business as usual for the US government to spend billions more than it takes in, and a public debt hovering at $17.2 trillion—up from $7 trillion just 10 years ago—seems no more alarming than a rainbow.

No surprise then that these people don't feel any need to own assets that might help them in times of crisis. Hard assets like…..gold.

I'm reminded of a visit I made to China several years ago. One night, I awoke in the middle of the night—something was crawling under the bed sheet. I shot up like a cannonball, trampolined out of bed, and hit the light switch. I searched and searched for whatever bug had made its way under the sheet, but never did find the little vermin. Still, I was so creeped out, I spent the rest of the night on the couch.

I told the staff the next morning what happened—and they did nothing. They just stared at me. They spoke English, so it wasn't that they didn't understand me. It was just that none of them seemed to think it was a big deal. One of them even chuckled. They obviously didn't appreciate the potential health hazard and had no sense of customer service. I left bemused, wondering how people could accept bedbugs as normal—or even if they did, how they could not care about a customer's experience. It was like being on another planet.

I have some of those same feelings when I think about mainstream investors today. How can they not appreciate the potential financial hazard inherent in something as obviously dangerous as today's unprecedented levels of money printing? How can they not care that they have nothing solid, like gold, at the core of their investment portfolios? It's like these people think they live on Planet Sesame Street.

Most people seem to really believe that today's heavy-handed government interventions are not only the right course of action, but will have no negative fallout. Massive currency dilution, unstoppable tides of rising debt, and never-ending fiscal imbalances are hardly a way to cure decades of money mismanagement, and certainly aren't consequence-free. How is it that this is not obvious to all?

I honestly don't know. Perhaps people are aware at some level, but the truth is just too awful to face, and so people don't.

Very few of my friends and neighbors own any gold. Rarely am I asked about it anymore, even by those who know what I do for a living. The doctor I saw last month gave me the distinct impression I could be doing better things with my money. Most of the mainstream media ignore gold, while many of the big banks loudly proclaim their latest short position as if they had some sort of divine insight.

I'm starting to feel like the proverbial lone voice in the woods….

 

But We're Not Alone!

As deluded as most Americans seem to be, that is definitely not the case for everyone in the world—the Japanese, for example, are much more prudent and levelheaded.

I wonder if my fellow citizens would feel differently if they lived in any of these countries where people have witnessed economic insanity firsthand, and are acting accordingly:

Japan was a net importer of gold in December, the first time in almost four years. Net purchases totaled 1,885 kilograms (60,604 ounces). It was only the tenth time Japan was a net monthly buyer since the end of 2005. There are reports that Japan's pension funds, which hold the world's second-largest pool of retirement assets, are buying gold.

Dubai gold jewelers just reported the strongest gold sales in seven years. Pure Gold Jewelers, one of the largest dealers in the country, reported a 25% increase in gold jewelry sales during the Dubai Shopping Festival this year.

The state of Gujarat in India reported that silver bullion imports hit a five year record from April 2013 to January 2014. Imports were more than 450% higher than the same period a year ago. The Indian government has since hiked the import duty on silver to 15%, the same rate as gold, and official imports in January subsequently fell. Smugglers will surely add silver to all those secret luggage compartments they've been using for gold.

Australia's Perth Mint said gold sales jumped 41% and silver 33% in 2013. In January, gold demand was up 10% and silver 8%.

Mexico's pension funds are now investing in gold after strict investment regulations were recently lifted. The World Gold Council says it spoke to 10 of the country's most influential pension fund managers (with over $160 billion in assets) and was told that they began investing in gold and commodities in 2013.

Central banks were once again big buyers last year. Of those that have reported so far…

• Turkey purchased 150.4 tonnes (4.83 million ounces)
• Vietnam 110 tonnes (3.53 million ounces)
• Russia 57.3 tonnes (1.84 million ounces)
• Kazakhstan 24.16 tonnes (776,762 ounces)
• Azerbaijan 16.02 tonnes (515,054 ounces)
• Sri Lanka 6.51 tonnes (209,301 ounces)
• Nepal 6.22 tonnes (199,977 ounces)
• Ukraine 6.22 tonnes (199,977 ounces)
• Indonesia 4.04 tonnes (129,889 ounces)
• Venezuela 1.87 tonnes (60,121 ounces)

 

And of Course, There's China….

 

Last year's record import number is impressive enough, but it's the pace that's mind-blowing. 1,139 tonnes is…

• More than 2011 and 2012 imports combined.

• Over 42% of global mine production last year.

• Roughly twice as much as the amount GLD sold in all of 2013.

 

Meanwhile, Back in the Good Ol' US of A…

Gold coin demand for 2013 jumped 24%. Some headlines have pointed out that January 2014 gold and silver coin sales were down compared to a year ago—but January 2013 was the all-time record for single-month sales. Further, Eagle and Buffalo gold coin sales were more than double December's sales, and were the highest since last April. Silver coin sales in January were almost four times more than in December.

There, now I feel better.

Even if you sometimes feel like a lone wolf investing in this market, understand that worldwide demand for gold and silver bullion continues unabated. If you live in the US, realize that people in many other countries are seeing more positive headlines about gold, have more friends who own gold, and heck, could even walk into a bank to buy gold.

I don't think the people in these other countries are stupid. Whatever consequences result from the historic levels of currency dilution across the globe, they seem as sure as I do that they'll be good for gold.
What should you buy? I first recommend buying gold and silver bullion to establish a financial safety net. And then, to maximize gains on the more speculative end of your portfolio, you should look at Louis James' just-released "10-bagger List for 2014" in the February issue of International Speculator. A 10-Bagger is a stock with the potential to gain 1,000% or more—that's not a typo, we really did make 10 times our money on junior gold stocks the last time the sector rebounded, and Louis thinks that's about to happen again.

For example, one of those prospective 10-Baggers is a junior with a multimillion-ounce gold project that's run by one of our Explorers League honorees. This company is on the verge of securing the funds needed to build its exceptionally high-margin gold mine, but it's on sale. Speaking of the potential, Louis said: "If the company delivers, it'd be easy to see these 40-cent shares trading for $4" by 2015.

Investing in these stocks, and there are nine of them on Louis' list, could quite literally make you a fortune, but the opportunity to get in on the ground floor is fading fast.

Click here to learn more about Louis' 10 Bagger List for 2014 or watch the recording of our just aired one hour video event "Upturn Millionaires" to learn why the time to act is now.


International Buying & Your Shot at 1,000% Gains

Gold Mini Contract Trade Entry Point with Stop

Gold futures in the April contract are trading above their 20 day but below their 100 day moving average which is pretty close at 1,275 going out this Friday afternoon in New York at 1,267 up about $10 after closing last Friday at 1,240 having one of its best trading weeks in quite some time. The next major resistance in gold is at 1,280 and if that level is broken we believe a bull market is underway as the gold market looks like it's finally bottomed entering new 2 month highs as the trend line has now been broken as prices are starting to climb higher.

We have not been particularly bullish gold for quite some time but things have changed and this is the most bullish we have been as we love the chart pattern on the daily chart and think prices have bottomed so if you're looking to take a shot to the upside my suggestion would be to buy a mini contract at today's price placing a stop below the contract low of 1,180 risking around $2,600 as last Friday's monthly unemployment number was very disappointing once again sending investors into treasury bonds and gold and we do believe gold prices are headed higher.

Last year gold was down 32% & was the 1st down year in 12 years and we do think prices may have gotten too low as volatility has now entered the stock market which is pushing money back in the gold sector and we do think prices will hit 1,300 the next couple of weeks as we are in the start of a bull market once again.

Trend: Higher
Chart structure: Excellent

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TV Pundits are Talking Coffee...Is that the Top? JO JVA

One of the oldest trading cliches in the book. "When the TV pundits are talking about it, and the barbers and taxi cab drivers are talking about it...the top is in". But not in coffee this year. We think we are just getting started. And when we talk coffee we always check in with our favorite coffee trader Mike Seery. Here's what Mike is saying....

Coffee futures have been the big story in recent weeks due to the fact of a huge rally in the last 2 weeks caused by hot & dry conditions in central Brazil which is causing prices to move much higher as we have not seen a drought since 1989 and there are no rains forecast in the next 7 days which could push prices up even higher.

Coffee is trading above its 20 and 100 day moving average settling at 137.85 a pound in the May contract up about 1000 points this week with extreme volatility as Brazil's crop is estimated between 54 – 55 million bags and that could be lowered if this drought continues in the month of February and as I talked about in previous blogs the volatility is extremely high.

So I would look at bull call option spreads for the month of July limiting your risk to what the premium costs also allowing you to stay in the market without getting stopped out because there are days like Thursday when prices were down 700 points which is around $3,000 a futures contract as the volatility is here to stay and I do think higher prices are coming.

The 50% retracement from the recent high to the low is right around 130 so if you’re looking to get into a futures contract I would look to buy that level placing my stop at the 10 day low which currently is at 115 risking around $5,500 per contract.

Coffee is a very large contract and if you're right it will pay you off tremendously as I've gone through similar events in this market especially in 1994 when prices went from $.75 to 2.70 in a matter of months due to a frost and if this drought does continue expect coffee possibly getting up to the $2 a pound level as prices could really explode just like what happened in the grain market in 2012.

Current coffee trend: HIGHER
Current chart structure: TERRIBLE

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SP 500 Elliott Wave Forecast Unfolding As We Projected, What Is Next?

Back on January 15^th we wrote an article and also a elliott wave forecast for both the public and our subscribers showing a likely top at a maximum of 1868 on the SP 500.  We said that Elliott Wave Major 3 of Primary Wave 3 would top no higher than that level.  In fact, we can go back to September 4^th 2013 and we projected a Major 3 high as 1822-1829.  Turns out we were only about 1% off 4 months in advance of projecting that high, and once again we are on track here with Major 4 commencing from Major 3 highs.

Below is the Major 3 chart we sent out on September 12^th in public articles and private reports



We simply use Fibonacci analysis of wave patterns which are based on human behavioural tendencies that go back centuries. Elliott Wave Theory is often hard to put into practice, so sometimes it gets a bad name.  However, a bad steak at a restaurant doesn’t mean you never have steak again right? The practitioner must hone his or her skills over time and work to improve accuracy.

Our view is pretty simple in that the Major wave 3 was 583 points going from 1267 to 1850, the double top.
Below is the chart we did on January 15^th in advance of this top:



We now know in hindsight that we topped out at 1850.  So what we want to do is simply take the 583 point rally of 1267 to 1850 (major 2 lows to Major 3 highs) and compute a retracement.  We use 23.6%, 31.2%, and 38% Fibonacci figures to come up with estimates. Those come in at 1713 on the shallow end of a correction (wave 4) and 1628 on the lower end.  (See chart below)



Now, assuming we are on track… once this Major 3 completes we will see a Major wave 5 of Primary wave 3 taking us to all-time highs. This will then complete Primary wave 3 of this 5 primary wave bull cycle and then larger Primary wave 4 corrections will ensue from those highs.  We will know we are wrong in our degrees of wave counts if we pierce the 1628 level on the downside. That would indicate Primary 3 topped out 1850 and we are in Primary 4, which is not our current view.

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Doug Casey on Gold Stocks

By Doug Casey, Chairman

The following is an excerpt from famous contrarian speculator and libertarian freethinker Doug Casey's latest book, Right on the Money. The interview with Casey Research Chief Metals & Mining Analyst Louis James took place on September 30, 2009, when gold stocks were clearly rebounding from their post-crash lows. Doug's thoughts are just as timely and true today as they were then, presenting a perfect picture of this most volatile and most rewarding of sectors.....



Louis: Doug, we were talking about gold last week, so we should follow up with a look at gold stocks. If one of the reasons to own gold is that it's real, it's not paper, it's not simultaneously someone else's liability, why own gold stocks?

Doug: Leverage. Gold stocks are problematical as investments. That's true of all resource stocks, especially stocks in exploration companies, as opposed to producers. If you want to make a proper investment, the way to do that is to follow the dictates of Graham and Dodd, using the method Warren Buffett has proven to be so successful over many years.

Unfortunately, resource stocks in general and metals exploration stocks in particular just don't lend themselves to such methodologies. They are another class of security entirely.

Louis: "Security" may not be the right word. As I was reading the latest edition of Graham and Dodd's classic book on securities analysis, I realized that their minimum criteria for investment wouldn't even apply to the gold majors. The business is just too volatile. You can't apply standard metrics.

Doug: It's just impossible. For one thing, they cannot grow consistently, because their assets are always depleting. Nor can they predict what their rate of exploration success is going to be.

Louis: Right. As an asset, a mine is something that gets used up, as you dig it up and sell it off.

Doug: Exactly. And the underlying commodity prices can fluctuate wildly for all sorts of reasons. Mining stocks, and resource stocks in general, have to be viewed as speculations, as opposed to investments.

But that can be a good thing. For example, many of the best speculations have a political element to them. Governments are constantly creating distortions in the market, causing misallocations of capital. Whenever possible, the speculator tries to find out what these distortions are, because their consequences are predictable. They result in trends you can bet on. It's like the government is guaranteeing your success, because you can almost always count on the government to do the wrong thing.

The classic example, not just coincidentally, concerns gold. The U.S. government suppressed its price for decades while creating huge numbers of dollars before it exploded upward in 1971. Speculators that understood some basic economics positioned themselves accordingly.

As applied to metals stocks, governments are constantly distorting the monetary situation, and gold in particular, being the market's alternative to government money, is always affected by that. So gold stocks are really a way to short government—or go long on government stupidity, as it were.

The bad news is that governments act chaotically, spastically. The beast jerks to the tugs on its strings held by its various puppeteers. So it's hard to predict price movements in the short term. You can only bet on the end results of chronic government monetary stupidity.

The good news is that, for that very same reason, these stocks are extremely volatile. That makes it possible, from time to time, to get not just doubles or triples but 10-baggers, 20-baggers, and even 100-to-1 shots in these mining stocks.

That kind of upside makes up for the fact that these stocks are lousy investments and that you will lose money on most of them, if you hold them long enough. Most are best described as burning matches.

Louis: One of our mantras: Volatility can be your best friend.

Doug: Yes, volatility can be your best friend, as long as your timing is reasonable. I don't mean timing tops and bottoms—no one can do that. I mean spotting the trend and betting on it when others are not, so you can buy low to later sell high. If you chase momentum and excitement, if you run with the crowd, buying when others are buying, you're guaranteed to lose. You have to be a contrarian. In this business, you're either a contrarian or road kill. When everyone is talking about these stocks on TV, you know the masses are interested, and that means they've gone to a level at which you should be a seller and not a buyer.

That makes it more a game of playing the psychology of the market, rather than doing securities analysis.

I'm not sure how many thousands of gold mining stocks there are in the world today—I'll guess about 3,000—but most of them are junk. If they have any gold, it's mainly in the words written on the stock certificates. So, in addition to knowing when to buy and when to sell, your choice of individual stocks has to be intelligent too.

Remember, most mining companies are burning matches.

Louis: All they do is spend money.

Doug: Exactly. That's because most mining companies are really exploration companies. They are looking for viable deposits, which is quite literally like looking for a needle in a haystack. Finding gold is one thing. Finding an economical deposit of gold is something else entirely.

And even if you do find an economical deposit of gold, it's exceptionally difficult to make money mining it. Most of your capital costs are up front. The regulatory environment today is onerous in the extreme. Labor costs are far above what they used to be. It ’s a really tough business.

Louis: If someone describes a new business venture to you, saying, "Oh, it'll be a gold mine!" Do you run away?

Doug: Almost. And it's odd because, historically, gold mining used to be an excellent business. For example, take the Homestake Mine in Deadwood, South Dakota, which was discovered in 1876, at just about the time of Custer's last stand, actually. When they first raised capital for that, their dividend structure was something like 100 percent of the initial share price, paid per month. That was driven by the extraordinary discovery. Even though the technology was very primitive and inefficient in those days, labor costs were low, you didn't have to worry about environmental problems, there were no taxes on whatever you earned, you didn't have to pay mountains of money to lawyers. Today, you probably pay your lawyers more than you pay your geologists and engineers.

So, the business has changed immensely over time. It's perverse because with the improvements in technology, gold mining should have become more economical, not less. The farther back you go in history, the higher the grade you'd have to mine in order to make it worthwhile. If we go back to ancient history, a mineable deposit probably had to be at least an ounce of gold per ton to be viable.

Today, you can mine deposits that run as low as a hundredth of an ounce (0.3 g/t). It's possible to go even lower, but you need very cooperative ore. And that trend toward lower grades becoming economical is going to continue.

For thousands of years, people have been looking for gold in the most obscure and bizarre places all over the world. That's because of the 92 naturally occurring elements in the periodic table, gold was probably the first metal that man discovered and made use of. The reason for that is simple: Gold is the most inert of the metals.

Louis: Because it doesn't react easily and form compounds, you can find the pure metal in nature.

Doug: Right. You can find it in its pure form, and it doesn't degrade and it doesn't rust. In fact, of all the elements, gold is not only the most inert, it's also the most ductile and the most malleable. And, after silver, it's the best conductor of both heat and electricity, and the most reflective. In today's world, that makes it a high-tech metal. New uses are found for it weekly. It has many uses besides its primary one as money and its secondary use as jewelry. But it was probably also man's first metal.

But for that same reason, all the high-grade, easy to find gold deposits have already been found. There's got to be a few left to be discovered, but by and large, we're going to larger volume, lower grade, "no see um"-type deposits at this point. Gold mining is no longer a business in which, like in the movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, you can get a couple of guys, some picks and mules, and go out and find the mother lode. Unfortunately. Now, it's usually a large scale, industrial earth moving operation next to a chemical plant.

Louis: They operate on very slender margins, and they can be rendered unprofitable by a slight shift in government regulations or taxes. So, we want to own these companies… why?

Doug: You want them strictly as speculative vehicles that offer the potential for 10, 100, or even 1,000 times returns on your money. Getting 1,000 times on your money is  extraordinary, of course—you have to buy at the bottom and sell at the top—but people have done it. It's happened not just once or twice, but quite a number of times that individual stocks have moved by that much.

That's the good news. The bad news is that these things fluctuate down even more dramatically than they fluctuate up. They are burning matches that can actually go to zero. And when they go down, they usually drop at least twice as fast as they went up.

Louis: That's true, but as bad as a total loss is, you can only lose 100 percent—but there's no such limit to the upside. A 100 percent gain is only a double, and we do much better than that for subscribers numerous times per year.

Doug: And as shareholders in everything from Enron to AIG, to Lehman Brothers, and many more have found out, even the biggest, most solid companies can go to zero.

Louis: So, what you're telling me is that the answer to "Why gold?" is really quite different to the answer to "Why gold stocks?" These are in completely different classes, bought for completely different reasons.

Doug: Yes. You buy gold, the metal, because you're prudent. It's for safety, liquidity, insurance. The gold stocks, even though they explore for or mine gold, are at the polar opposite of the investment spectrum; you buy those for extreme volatility and the chance it creates for spectacular gains. It's rather paradoxical, actually.

Louis: You buy gold for safety and gold stocks specifically to profit from their "un-safety."

Doug: Exactly. They really are total opposites, even though it's the same commodity in question. It's odd, but then, life is often stranger than fiction.

Louis: And it's being a contrarian—"timing" in the sense of making a rational decision about a trend in evident motion—that helps stack the odds in your favor. It allows you to guess when market volatility will, on average, head upward, making it possible for you to buy low and sell high.

Doug: You know, I first started looking at gold stocks back in the early 1970s. In those days, South African stocks were the "blue chips" of the mining industry. As a country, South Africa mined about 60 percent of all the gold mined in the world, and costs were very low.

Gold was controlled at $35 per ounce until Nixon closed the gold window in 1971, but some of the South Africans were able to mine it for $20 an ounce or less. They were paying huge dividends.

Gold had run up from $35 to $200 in early 1974, then corrected down to $100 by 1976. It had come off 50 percent, but at the same time that gold was bottoming around $100, they had some serious riots in Soweto. So the gold stocks got a double hit: falling gold prices and fear of revolution in South Africa. That made it possible, in those days, to buy into short lived, high cost mining companies very cheaply; the stocks of the marginal companies were yielding current dividends of 50 to 75 percent. They were penny stocks in those days. They no longer exist; they've all been merged into mining finance houses long since then. Three names that I remember from those days were Leslie, Bracken, Grootvlei; I owned a lot of shares in them. If you bought Leslie for 80 cents a share, you'd expect, based on previous dividends, to get about 60 cents a share in that year.

But then gold started flying upward, the psychology regarding South Africa changed, and by 1980, the next real peak, you were getting several times what you paid for the stock, in dividends alone, per year.

Louis: Wow. I can think of some leveraged companies that might be able to deliver that sort of performance, if gold goes where we think it will. So, where do you think we are in the current trend or metals cycle? You've spoken of the Stealth, Wall of Worry, and Mania Phases of a bull market for metals—do you still think of our market in those terms?

Doug: That's the big question, isn't it? Well, the last major bottom in this sector was from 1998 to 2002. Many of these junior mining stocks—mostly traded in Canada, where about 75 percent of all the gold stocks in the world trade, were trading for less than cash in the bank. Literally. You'd get all their properties, their technology, the expertise of their management, totally for free. Or less.

Louis: I remember seeing past issues in which you said, "If I could call your broker and order these stocks for you, I would."

Doug: Yes. But nobody wanted to hear about it at that time. Gold was low, and there was a bubble in Internet stocks. Why would anyone want to get involved in a dead-duck, nineteenth century, "choo choo train" industry like gold mining? It had been completely discredited by the long bear market, but that made it the ideal time to buy them, of course. That was deep in the Stealth Phase.

Over the next six to eight years, these stocks took off, moving us into the Wall of Worry Phase. But the stocks didn't fly the way they did in past bull markets. I think that's mostly because they were so depleted of capital, they were selling lots of shares. So their market capitalizations—the aggregate value given them by the market—were increasing, but their share prices weren't. Not as much.

Remember, these companies very rarely have any earnings, but they always need capital, and the only way they can get it is by selling new shares, which dilutes the value of the individual shares, including those held by existing shareholders.

Then last fall hit, and nobody, but nobody, wanted anything speculative. These most volatile of stocks showed their nature and plunged through the floor in the general flight to safety. That made last fall the second best time to buy mining shares this cycle, and I know you recommended some pretty aggressive buying last fall, near the bottom.

Now, many of these shares—the better ones at least—have recovered substantially, and some have even surpassed pre-crash highs. Again, the Wall of Worry Phase is characterized by large fluctuations that separate the wolves from the sheep (and the sheep from their cash).

Where does that leave us? Well, as you know, I think gold is going to go much, much higher. And that is going to direct a lot of attention toward these gold stocks. When people get gold fever, they are not just driven by greed, they're usually driven by fear as well, so you get both of the most powerful market motivators working for you at once. It's a rare class of securities that can benefit from fear and greed at once.

Remember that the Fed ’s pumping up of the money supply ignited a huge bubble in tech stocks, and then an even more massive global bubble in real estate—which is over for a long time, incidentally—but they're still creating tons of dollars. That will inevitably ignite other asset bubbles. Where? I can't say for certain, but I say the odds are extremely high that as gold goes up, for all the reasons we spoke about last week and more, that a lot of this funny money is going to be directed into these gold stocks, which are not just a microcap area of the market but a nanocap area of the market.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: When the public gets the bit in its teeth and wants to buy gold stocks, it's going to be like trying to siphon the contents of the Hoover Dam through a garden hose.

Gold stocks, as a class, are going to be explosive. Now, you've got to remember that most of them are junk. Most will never, ever find an economical deposit. But it's hopes and dreams that drive them, not reality, and even without merit, they can still go 10, 20, or 30 times your entry price. And the companies that actually have the goods can go much higher than that.

At the moment, gold stock prices are not as cheap, in either relative or absolute terms, as they were at the turn of the century, nor last fall. But given that the Mania Phase is still ahead, they are good speculations right now—especially the ones that have actually discovered gold deposits that look economical.

Louis: So, if you buy good companies now, with good projects, good management, working in stable jurisdictions, with a couple years of operating cash to see them through the Wall of Worry fluctuations—if you buy these and hold for the Mania Phase, you should come out very well. But you can't blink and get stampeded out of your positions when the market fluctuates sharply.

Doug: That's exactly right. At the particular stage where we are right now in this market for these extraordinarily volatile securities, if you buy a quality exploration company, or a quality development company (which is to say, a company that has found something and is advancing it toward production), those shares could still go down 10, 20, 30, or even 50 percent, but ultimately there's an excellent chance that that same stock will go up by 10, 50, or even 100 times. I hate to use such hard-to-believe numbers, but that is the way this market works.

When the coming resource bubble is ignited, there are excellent odds you'll be laughing all the way to the bank in a few years.

I should stress that I'm not saying that this is the perfect time to buy. We're not at a market bottom as we were in 2001, nor an interim bottom like last November, and I can't say I know the Mania Phase is just around the corner. But I think this is a very reasonable time to be buying these stocks. And it's absolutely a good time to start educating yourself about them. There's just such a good chance a massive bubble is going to be ignited in this area.

Louis: These are obviously the kinds of things we research, make recommendations on, and educate about in our metals newsletters, but one thing we should stress for non subscribers reading this interview is that this strategy applies only to the speculative portion of your portfolio. No one should gamble with their rent money nor the money they've saved for college tuition, etcetera.

Doug: Right. The ideal speculator's portfolio would be divided into 10 areas, each totally different and not correlated with each other. Each of these areas should have, in your subjective opinion, the ability to move 1,000 percent in price.

Why is that? Because most of the time, we're wrong when we pick areas to speculate in, certainly in areas where you can't apply Graham-Dodd-type logic. But if you're wrong on 9 out of 10 of them, and it would be hard to do that badly, then you at least break even on the one 10-bagger (1,000 percent winner). What's more likely is that a couple will blow up and go to zero, a couple will go down 30, 40, 50 percent, but you'll also have a couple doubles or triples, and maybe, on one or two of them, you'll get a 10-to-1 or better win.

So, it looks very risky (and falling in love with any single stock is very risky), but it's actually an intelligent way to diversify your risk and stack the odds of profiting on volatility in your favor.

Note that I don't mean that these "areas" should be 10 different stocks in the junior mining sector—that wouldn't be diversification. As I say, ideally, I'd have 10 such areas with potential for 1,000 percent gains, but it's usually impossible to find that many at once. If you can find only two or three, what do you do with the rest of your money? Well, at this point, I would put a lot of it into gold, in one form or another, while keeping your powder dry as you look for the next idea opportunity.

And ideally, I'd look at every market in every country in the world. People who look only in the United States, or only in stocks, or only in real estate—they just don't get to see enough balls to swing at.

Louis: Okay, got it. Thank you very much.

In 2009, at the time of this interview, Doug said it was not the perfect time to buy because "we're not at a market bottom." That, however, has changed dramatically. In the last two years, gold mining stocks have gotten slaughtered, and even the best companies with proven, high-grade gold deposits are now trading 50-75% below their actual value. 

The time where contrarian investors can literally make a fortune may be close: Right now, Doug and many other seasoned resource investors are seeing unmistakable signs of an imminent turnaround in the gold market. 

Find out how to play the turning tides of the precious metals market by watching "Upturn Millionaires," a free online video event hosted by Casey Research—featuring Doug Casey, Porter Stansberry, Rick Rule, John Mauldin, Frank Giustra, Ross Beaty, Louis James, and Marin Katusa.  

Click here to save your seat.


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Telephone Stocks Hang Up and Autos Run Us Over as Markets Head Lower. Here's our Summary - Gold, Crude Oil, Natural Gas, SP 500 and Coffee

The DOW closed sharply lower on Monday as it extends the decline off January's high. Today's sell off was triggered by a sharp decline in telephone stocks, disappointment over auto sales by Ford and General Motors and reports that Jos. A. Bank Clothiers will not enter into takeover talks.

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The SP500 closed sharply lower [March contract] on Monday and below the 2012-2013 uptrend line crossing near 1744.00 confirming that am intermediate trend change is taking place. The low range close sets the stage for a steady to lower opening when Tuesday's night session begins trading. Stochastics and the RSI are oversold but remain neutral to bearish signaling that additional weakness is possible near term. If March extends this year's decline, the 25% retracement level of the 25% retracement level of 2012's rally crossing at 1692.03 is the next downside target. Closes above the 20 day moving average crossing at 1811.38 are needed to confirm that a short term low has been posted. First resistance is the 10 day moving average crossing at 1791.33. Second resistance is the 20 day moving average crossing at 1811.38. First support is today's low crossing at 1735.50. Second support is the 25% retracement level of 2012's rally crossing at 1692.03.


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Crude oil closed lower due to profit taking on Monday as it consolidated some of the rally off January's low. Today's low range close sets the stage for a steady to lower opening when Tuesday's night session begins. Stochastics and the RSI are overbought but are turning neutral to bearish hinting that a short term top might be in or is near. Closes below the 20 day moving average crossing at 95.00 would confirm that a short term top has been posted. If March extends the aforementioned rally, the 87% retracement level of the December-January decline crossing at 99.58 is the next upside target. First resistance is the 75% retracement level of the December-January decline crossing at 98.47. Second resistance is the 87% retracement level of the December-January decline crossing at 99.58. First support is today's low crossing at 96.26. Second support is the 20 day moving average crossing at 95.06.

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Natural gas [March contract] closed lower on Monday. The high range close sets the stage for a steady to higher opening on Tuesday. Stochastics and the RSI are bearish hinting that a pause in the rally is possible or that a short term top has been posted. Closes below the 20 day moving average crossing at 4.528 would confirm that a short term top has been posted. If March renews this winter's rally, monthly resistance crossing at 6.108 is the next upside target. First resistance is last Wednesday's high crossing at 5.486. Second resistance is monthly resistance crossing at 6.108. First support is the 10 day moving average crossing at 4.843. Second support is the 20 day moving average crossing at 4.528.

Here's detailed analysis on the March Natural Gas contract

Gold closed higher [April contract] on Monday. The mid range close sets the stage for a steady opening when Tuesday's night session begins trading. Stochastics and the RSI are neutral to bearish signaling that sideways to lower prices are possible near term. If April extends last week's decline, the reaction low crossing at 1215.30 is the next downside target. If April renews the rally off December's low, the 50% retracement level of the August-December decline crossing at 1306.20 is the next upside target. First resistance is last Monday's high crossing at 1280.10. Second resistance is the 50% retracement level of the August-December decline crossing at 1306.20. First support is the reaction low crossing at 1230.80. Second support is the reaction low crossing at 1215.30.

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Coffee closed sharply higher on Monday [March contract] as it extends this rally off November's low. The high range close set the stage for a steady to higher opening on Tuesday. Stochastics and the RSI are bullish signaling that sideways to higher prices are possible near term. If March extends the rally off November's low, last July's high crossing at 13.80 is the next upside target. Closes below the 10 day moving average crossing at 11.87 would confirm that a short term top has been posted.

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Is February a Risk On or Risk Off Trade: Equities or Gold & Bonds

Recent price action in the stock market has many traders on edge. With the market closing below our key support trend line last week, the market has now technically starting a down trend.

While trend lines are a great tool for identifying a weakening trend and reversals in the market, I do not put a lot of my analysis weighting on them.

Most of my timing and trading is based around what I call INNER-Market Analysis (Market Stages, Cycles, Momentum and Sentiment). Using these data we can diagnose the overall health of the market. Knowing the strength of the market we can then forecast short term trend reversals before they happen with a high degree of accuracy.

In this report I keep things clean and simple using just trend lines. During the last three weeks we have seen the price of stocks pullback. And because 2013 was such a strong year for stocks most participants are expecting a sharp market correction to take place anytime now.

So with the recent price correction fear is starting to enter the market and money is rotating out of stocks and into the Risk Off assets like gold and bonds.

Stocks tend to fall in times of economic uncertainty or fear. These same factors push investors towards the safety trades (Risk Off) high quality bonds and precious metals. As more money goes from risk on to risk off, stocks will continue to fall and the safety trades will rise. The move by investors to select the safety of gold and bonds compared to the volatility of stocks will result in these risk plays to moving in opposite directions.

Let’s take a look at the chart below for a visual of what looks to be unfolding…...

 

How to Trade These Markets:

 

While these markets look to be starting to reverse trends, it is critical that we understand how the market moves during reversals and understand position/money management.

Getting short stocks and long precious metals in the long run could work out very well, but if you understand the price action that typically happens during reversals you know that the stock market will become choppy and we could see the recent highs tested or possibly even a new high made before price actually starts a down trend. And the opposite situation for gold and bonds. Drawdowns can be huge when investing and why I don’t just change position directions when the first sign of a trend change shows up on the chart.

Price reversals are a process, not an event. So it is important to follow along using a short term time frame like the daily chart and play the intermediate trends that last 4-12 weeks in length. By doing this, you are trading in the direction of the most active cycle in the stock market and positioned properly as new a trend starts.

What I am looking for in the next week or two:

 

1. Stocks to trade sideways or drift higher for 3-6 days, then I will be looking to get short. Again, cycle, sentiment, and momentum analysis must remain down for me to short the market. If they turn back up I will remain in cash until a setup for another short or long entry forms.

2. Gold remains in a down trend but is starting to breakout to the upside. I do have concerns with the daily chart patterns for both gold and silver, so next week will be critical for them. We will be using some ETF Trading Strategies to take advantage of these moves.

3. Bond prices (not yields) look to be forming a bottom “W” pattern. They have had a big run in the last few weeks and are now testing resistance. I think a long bond position is slowly starting to unfold but if we look at the futures price charts for both bonds and gold, they have not yet broken to the upside and have more work to do. As mentioned before ETFs are not really the best tool for charting but I show them because they what the masses follow and trade.

Get these reports every week free at: The Gold & Oil Guy.com

Chris Vermeulen

Author of  “Technical Trading Mastery – 7 Steps To Win With Logic”

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Mike Seery on Gold, Silver, Sugar and Coffee Futures

It's time to check in with our trading partner Mike Seery to get his take on where our favorite commodities are headed. Say what you want about the current pull back in the indexes we are glad to see the volatility, we finally have us a real market.

Gold Futures

Gold futures finished the week at 1,240 still continuing their choppy trade as investors sold off the precious metal later in the week despite the fact that the S&P 500 is having huge volatility which generally spooks investors into buying gold but the precious metal closed very poorly in my opinion. I have a hard time believing that gold is going to start to rally anytime soon as it might be stuck in the mud and could trade choppy for quite some time. The U.S dollar hit a 7 week high today which is bearish gold prices as the printing press here in the United States is starting to stop which is creating a higher U.S dollar versus the foreign currencies and that is bearish commodity prices in general. I’m recommending investors to sit on the sideline in the gold market at this time as there really is no trend as you have to look for a market that is trending up or down because if you screw around with markets that go up and down and have no trend with constant choppiness that will kill you in the long run. The trend in gold continues sideways and chart structure is very poor.

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Silver Futures

Silver futures continued their 9 week consolidation finishing at 19.12 an ounce in the March contract right near contract lows of 18.72 & if that level is broken you have to think prices would head lower in the short term. The emerging market crisis over the last couple of weeks I think is hurting silver prices here in the short term but this too will blow over, as if your long term investor I still think silver prices look attractive as eventually inflation will come back into this market it’s just a matter of when. Silver futures are trading below their 20 & 100 day moving average and the longer the consolidation in my opinion the stronger the move will be when prices truly break out while the breakout to the upside is at 20.67 & the breakout to the downside is 18.72 as prices were unable to rally despite the fact that there was panic selling in the S&P 500 as money poured out of the stock market into the bond market but not into the precious metals which tells me the market still currently looks weak. Silver trend remains to the down side, chart structure is excellent.

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Sugar Futures

Sugar futures in the March contract finished sharply higher for the 2nd consecutive trading session closing at 15.55 now trading above its 20 day but still below its 100 day moving average as I’ve been recommending a short position in sugar for quite some time getting stopped out as today as prices hit the 10 day high as funds liquidated huge short positions so sit on the sidelines and wait and see what develops. I’m a technical trader and I must have some exit strategies in place and my exit strategy is placing my stop at the 10 day high but you can have something different possibly a 15 day high or 7 day high so create some type of exit strategy for your personal account still maintaining the proper risk management as I do think prices are still headed lower but I can’t recommend a short position at this time as the trend has now turned neutral here in the short term. If you’re not a trend follower I would have to believe that you have to continue to sell sugar as supplies are too high as there are some dry areas in Brazil which is causing some concern possibly cutting some crop production, however I think today was massive short covering as the funds covered in today’s trading session. The trend for sugar remains mixed but the chart structure is excellent.

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Coffee Futures

Coffee futures exploded to the upside for the 3rd consecutive trading day hitting 5 month highs at 125.20 a pound up over 1100 points for the week as investors are pouring in thinking that the long term bottom in coffee has finally been hit in the last several months. Coffee is trading above its 20 and 100 day moving average telling you that the trend in the short term is higher but at this point this market has absolutely terrible chart structure so I have a hard time buying it because the 10 day low is at 114 risking around $4,400 per contract so I’m recommending to sit on the sidelines and wait for some better chart structure to develop as I do think there will be profit taking eventually. The U.S dollar hit a 7 week high today and I believe that eventually could start to pressure commodity prices especially with the emerging markets now having difficulties but the trend in some markets have been heading higher despite that headwind and coffee prices historically are still relatively cheap. Keep an eye on this market as the real volatility will start in the month of May when we begin frost season down in Brazil but it does look to me that coffee is in a bottoming process. While the coffee trend still appears to be higher the chart structure is well....awful.

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Is this a turning point for the Junior Gold Stocks?

By Doug Hornig, Senior Editor

 

It's not exactly news that gold mining stocks have been in a slump for more than two years. Many investors who owned them have thrown in the towel by now, or are holding simply because a paper loss isn't a realized loss until you sell.


For contrarian speculators like Doug Casey and Rick Rule, though, it's the best of all scenarios. "Buy when blood is in the streets," investor Nathan Rothschild allegedly said. And buy they do, with both hands—because, they assert, there are definitive signs that things may be turning around.

So what's the deal with junior mining stocks, and who should invest in them? I'll give you several good reasons not to touch them with a 10 foot pole… and one why you maybe should.

First, you need to understand that junior gold miners are not buy-and-forget stocks. They are the most volatile securities in the world—"burning matches," as Doug calls them. To speculate in those stocks requires nerves of steel.

Let's take a look at the performance of the juniors since 2011. The ETF that tracks a basket of such stocks—Market Vectors Junior Gold Miners (GDXJ)—took a savage beating. In early April of 2011, a share would have cost you $170. Today, you can pick one up for about $36… that's a decline of nearly 80%.

There are something like 3,000 small mining companies in the world today, and the vast majority of them are worthless, sitting on a few hundred acres of moose pasture and a pipe dream.

It's a very tough business. Small-cap exploration companies (the "juniors") are working year round looking for viable deposits. The question is not just if the gold is there, but if it can be extracted economically, and the probability is low. Even the ones that manage to find the goods and build a mine aren't in the clear yet: before they can pour the first bar, there are regulatory hurdles, rising costs of labor and machinery, and often vehement opposition from natives to deal with.

As the performance of junior mining stocks is closely correlated to that of gold, when the physical metal goes into a tailspin, gold mining shares follow suit. Only they tend to drop off faster and more deeply than physical gold.

Then why invest in them at all?

Because, as Casey Chief Metals & Mining Strategist Louis James likes to say, the downside is limited—all you can lose is 100% of your investment. The upside, on the other hand, is infinite.
In the rebound periods after downturns such as the one we're in, literal fortunes can be made; gains of 400-1,000% (and sometimes more) are not a rarity. It's a speculator's dream.

When speculating in junior miners, timing is crucial. Bear runs in the gold sector can last a long time—some of them will go on until the last faint hearted investor has been flushed away and there's no one left to sell.
At that point they come roaring back. It happened in the late '70s, it happened several times in the '80s when gold itself pretty much went to sleep, and again in 2002 after a four year retreat.

The most recent rally of 2009-'10 was breathtaking: Louis' International Speculator stocks, which had gotten hammered with the rest of the market, handed subscribers average gains of 401.8%—a level of return Joe the Investor never gets to see in his lifetime.

So where are we now in the cycle?

The present downturn, as noted, kicked off in the spring of 2011, and despite several "mini rallies", the overall trend has been down. Recently, though, the natural resource experts here at Casey Research and elsewhere have seen clear signs of an imminent turnaround.

For one thing, the price of gold itself has stabilized. After hitting its peak of $1,921.50 in September of 2011, it fell back below $1,190 twice last December. Since then, it hasn't tested those lows again and is trading about 6.5% higher today.

The demand for physical gold, especially from China, has been insatiable. The Austrian mint had to hire more employees and add a third eight-hour shift to the day in an attempt to keep up in its production of Philharmonic coins. "The market is very busy," a mint spokesperson said. "We can't meet the demand, even if we work overtime." Sales jumped 36% in 2013, compared to the year before.

Finally, the junior mining stocks have perked up again. In fact, for the first month of 2014, they turned in the best performance of any asset, as you can see here:

(Source: Zero Hedge)

The writing's on the wall, say the pros, that the downturn won't last much longer—and when the junior miners start taking off again, there's no telling how high they could go.

To present the evidence and to discuss how to play the turning tides in the precious metals market, Casey Research is hosting a timely online video event titled Upturn Millionaires next Wednesday, February 5, at 2:00 p.m. Eastern.



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