Tag Archives: commodities

Investing in natural resources and precious metals is attractive today because the sector is so much cheaper than it was three years ago. Many of the stocks are trading at a 90 percent discount to their prices in 2011. For a contrarian investor, I believe that we are seeing a historic opportunity now.

Over the next couple of months everything should generally rise together but once the dollar puts in an intermediate bottom sometime in March or April, commodities and gold will move down into an intermediate correction as the stock market completes its final blow off top. After the stock market parabola collapses later this summer it will be time to put the pedal to the metal in the commodity markets, and especially the precious metal markets as the Great Inflation begins in earnest.

While the stock market is the only game in town - for now - stocks will not continue to out perform all other asset classes indefinitely. Eventually either bonds and gold will rally or stocks will crash very hard. It is one, the other, or even more likely a mixture of both.

Precious metals - Gold, Silver, Platinum, Palladium and there respective mining shares - have failed to sustain any rebound despite tremendously supportive sentiment amid an extreme oversold condition. Nevertheless, we believe that the bottom is in and a rebound should begin very soon. The question though is, "What will the driving force be for a sustainable rebound which will evolve into a new cyclical bull market?" Below are several options to be considered and my assessment as to which it will be - and why.

While falling commodity prices are beneficial to countries that are net energy and commodity importers they actually may be signals of weaknesses in the growth of the global economy and economic weakness across the globe.

With everyone being so very busy these days often a picture is worth a 1000 words so I have collected a series of infographics below for you which do just that. You'll get the picture in half the time you could assimilate it via the written word.

[In spite of what] the typical Wall Street cheerleaders, I mean strategists, are predicting, we see the equity market ever more closer to its cyclical top, miners about to retest a major bottom and hard assets with a new catalyst. [This article analyzes 9 pieces of information, complete with charts, that show what is actually going on in the marketplace at this point in time and what the short-term future holds.] Words: 930; Charts: 8

Our ever-popular Periodic Table of Commodity Returns has been updated through 2012. It shows a decade of results across 14 different commodities, providing strikingly rich information in a very insightful format.

We know that state-run central banks ALWAYS try to inflate their way out of debt [because, quite] simply, it's the easiest way to make debt go away....Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner might call their inflationary measures by a different name - like quantitative easing - but the effect is the same [and,] make no mistake [about it,] these policies will destroy lives [on one hand, and make those in the know a small fortune on the other. This article explains the options].

One couldn't imagine any better Christmas gift for hard assets and stocks than Ben Bernanke's surprise introduction of QE4 right on the heels of QE3. Call the duo QE7. "QE7" promises to expand the monetary base far faster than the markets had been discounting [which is great for gold] and also raises the floor under stocks. I suspect we'll close 2012 with a run at the highs, and possibly climb just short of 1,600 on the S&P 500 sometime in Q1. As for Treasury bonds, well, could this spell the end of the bond market? [Let's look at the ramifications of QE4 more closely.] Words: 516