Commodities are down early this morning as we started the week with a big selloff in overseas markets and resurgent dollar.
Gold is down $12.68 to $1,756.94 and silver is off $0.69 to $33.73, for a silver/gold ratio creeping back up to 52. I anticipated a correction, just not this soon.
I was reading a story in the popular financial press that mentioned the word “goldbug”. Personally, I find that term annoying, as if my interest in gold and silver were the feverish result of an insect bite instead of a reasoned calculation of my own rational best interests as an investor.
Notice it’s usually Wall Street professionals using that term? There’s a reason they don’t like gold and silver investors and that’s because it cuts their commissions when people like you and I make defensive investments in hard assets. They want you to feel like they have all the answers and your best option is the rigged game we call the stock market. In the interest of disclosure, I do hold some equity investments, but not as individual stocks. I invest in broad market indexes and a broad range of sector index funds. The vultures on Wall Street still find ways to pick at those investments, but the bite on ETFs is smaller.
Some of you may think I encourage investors to consider gold and silver because I write for a precious metals dealer. Let me tell you plainly that my sponsor has never attempted to influence the content of my columns, unless it’s to correct a factual error.
You might be surprised to learn that only about 1 percent of investors have any precious metals investments and even fewer take a disciplined approach to the percentage of their wealth kept in the form of bullion-priced bars and rounds. That’s because there’s a smaller margin in metals for Wall Street and hence gold and silver have no sales team at big investment houses. Though it does insure that articles about a couple gold dealers in New York finding tungsten cored gold bars get wide circulation in the financial press.
Just so you know, there are ways to check for tampering and you might be surprised to find out the turnover of gold bars is quite high. Bars and rounds are regularly melted down by jewelers and refiners, widespread fraud would be found out quickly. This week I’ll cover more about why the circulating supply of gold bars and rounds is really quite safe.