Gold Editorials & Commentary

The U.S. equities market last week resumed its technical weakness but provided further clues as to where its intermediate-term trend may be pointing.

Chart Symmetry is designed around the observation that prices tend to change direction along certain preferred gradients. New readers are advised to read the first article in this series to discover how Chart Symmetry works.

It was a bearish week on Wall Street. While the Dow did post a 59-point rise, and the Morgan Stanley Cyclical index and utilities gained more than 1%, most other averages were in decline. The S&P 500 was hit for about a 2% loss.

Gold only seems to have lost its luster because prices on gold have gone down for 18 years.

Why this time the resulting bust will be worse:

Persistent rumors have been coming out of London for three weeks that G-7 bankers have been bailing out hedge funds to the tune of $25 billion and at the same time making a coordinated effort to drive down the price of gold, so that as m

Looming economic reports . . . contributed to the "buyer's strike" atmosphere on Wall Street in the final hour, which was marvelously easy to trade with respect to intraday S&P activity during Wed.

After almost two tumultuous weeks of trading, the U.S. equities outlook has now definitely established at least a short-term downtrend.

What is likely to happen to the price of gold? Up or down?

Leverage:

It was a decisive week for the bearish view, with losses for the dollar, credit markets and stocks. For the week, the Dow and S&P 500 dropped about 2%. The Morgan Stanley Cyclical index and the Utilities shed 3%.

I'd like to offer a unique perspective (most remaining gold stock investors are focused only on big hedgers like Barrick Gold) on picking rewarding gold stocks for the next gold bull cycle.

The market environment . .

Deflation and policy makers' attempts to defeat it:

Most economists and financial journalists continue to misidentify the meaning of the fall in the U.S. dollar price of gold. That price has plummeted from about $300 per ounce a year ago to near $250 recently.

It's the proverbial "eleventh hour" in this 17-year-old bull market and the manipulators are out in force.

Quiescent Federal Reserve gradualism . .

Wow, it was another wild and difficult week for the bear camp. The Dow was largely unchanged, gaining 15 points, while the S&P 500 rose about 1%.

The following excerpted material is important for understanding the way many view U.S. stocks today:

Ian Gordon is a broker with a major Canadian brokerage firm. Admittedly, he is not a household name - at least not yet. That might change if he is reading the current stock market cycle properly.

Gold stocks: the next Internet boom!

Taking a breather . .

Several years ago in an essay on gold ("The Golden Sextant"), I pointed out that gold is arbitraged like currencies, which is to say on the basis of interest rate differentials.

IT HAS been almost a year to the day since the stock market went into a brief but steep decline, falling 20 percent in just six weeks and giving Wall Street its first whiff of real fear since the October 1987 crash.

The exact wording of a key portion of the Fed's official statement following its June 30 Federal Open Market Committee meeting read: "...the FOMC has chosen to adopt a directive that includes no predilection about near term policy action

In its aspiration for a new and perfect world, the New Age Movement believes that there will have to be a "paradigm shift", which will change the conventional way of thinking.

Optimism ahead of Yahoo! . . . probably enhanced the late Wednesday market tone, though it's not something that impacted the futures, given the low premium at day's end.

Money is generally thought of, if at all, in practical terms: how to get it, what to do with it.

The stock bubble of 1999 constitutes perhaps the most dangerous, speculative investment climate ever.