SIPPS and Forex??

Loopgames

Well, I found a financial advisor who will help. He actually agreed that gold is now the best time to invest. As opposed to another one who just scoffed at me at the mere mention..she said something along the lines of 'you missed the boat dear'...:D

dunstonh

Loopgames wrote: »

Well, I found a financial advisor who will help. He actually agreed that gold is now the best time to invest. As opposed to another one who just scoffed at me at the mere mention..she said something along the lines of 'you missed the boat dear'...:D

So, which one is right?

Loopgames

dunstonh wrote: »

So, which one is right?

Time will tell. But I've got my money on the first guy. Literally.

System

Loopgames

Good for you. Any financial advisor who says you've missed the boat on gold still just doesn't get it! And, yes Dunstonh, who is right? They're both supposedly from a "profession"!

The entire reason that you can't get any help in this area is because a pack of bureaucrats, namely the government, have correctly identified that the entire industry is nothing more than a den of hyenas and now they aren't allowed to give any advice - even when all you want to know is where to get what you want!

It's like going into your local supermarket and asking an assistant where the aisle selling asparagus soup is only to be told that they can't answer because their record on selling ground up coal and passing it off as soup has resulted in them not now legally being able to reply!

But good news, you can pay them £1000 and fill in a pack of forms and they'll be happy to guide you as to the flavour that might best suit you, together with where you can get said flavoured soup and a breakdown of how they're making a further cut as a backhander from the sale of the soup - should you decide to proceed.

My advice on gold, and it is only my FREE humble opinion, is that it will likely peak a lot higher than it currently is and get there quite quickly. From a technical standpoint (i.e. charts) the price line tends to rise exponentially and we are now in hyperbolic takeoff territory. BE VERY CAREFUL - you can make a lot of money but inevitably the price will eventually peak and fall VERY DRAMATICALLY. And it tends to be when all the "professionals" are of the opinion that gold is the only place to be that it precisely isn't the place to be. The fact that your lady advisor say's you've missed the boat is very reasuring!

When Gordon Brown, our genius chancellor, sold our gold reserves because it made more sense to stack printed paper up in vaults, that was the exact moment to buy gold! He sold it at the absolute bottom of the market - quite an achievement and almost UNBELIEVABLE! And yes, dunstonh, I was saying it at the time - yelling it in fact. Don't forget what I said about silver either 'cos that's REALLY going to rocket.

To answer your question, Loopgames, your main limitation is the size of your fund. You'll eat it up if you go for a sipp provider who will give you free rein to open accounts with Bullionvault or similar. Unfortunately you will have to go with a sipp provider who offers bog standard funds but only charges nominal fees.

It's not ideal, but you might like to look at the SPDR gold fund. This is an ETF (exchange traded fund) but crucially it is backed by real gold. Basically the fund holds real gold and you can trade "shares" in that pool of gold. The fund really does buy and sell LARGE quantities of gold to back the traded element - yesterday it bought a record 30 tonnes (it already has about 1000 tonnes) just to keep pace with the euro investors seeking a safe haven from their worthless paper "money" which is backed by precisely nothing other than dubious promises.

I think most of the budget sipps will allow you to trade SPDR ETF's. All you need to do is ring up a sipp and ask them. Go for as cheap as possible because you know what you want and all you want to be paying for is the unavoidable bureaucratic slice that gets you from a to b - i.e. some so called profession which has ticked a whole pile of boxes and declared itself a regulated tax wrapper - YAWN!

No wonder this country is on its knees - the remaining people doing productive work are bled dry by layer upon layer of parasites swarming over an ever-dwindling number of hosts.

Gold is really meant for burying in your back garden but with a pension pot the government won't let you protect your own money (and your future well being) and would rather force you to deal with a bunch of rapacious crooks.

Given that we have to deal with paper promises, at least the SPDR ETF piece of paper is backed by gold - albeit that the government can just grab the lot when it wants to! The 1000 tonnes of gold is held in New York so make your own mind up as to the risks of government theft.

Hope this helps and all the best of luck to you!

Loopgames

Thanks for the heads up on the costs.

I have a simple strategy that I would like to try and if it works it works..if it doesn't then I'm researching ways to cut the annual costs of SIPP once it is set up.

So for example...I will look at putting literally my one pension egg into one gold basket to see if it grows into a swan or an ugly duckling...:D

purch

Any financial advisor who says you've missed the boat on gold still just doesn't get it!

Yes.

You 'cannot miss the boat' on an item, the absolute value of which stay's constant.

Yes, there are short term movements from which a 'speculator' might gain/lose, but the place Gold holds in our economy is as a fixed measure of absolute value.

smerch1468

sihutchuk wrote: »

dunstonh,

I find your comments condescending and patronising. This thread is from someone who's decided to take control of their own finances and good on them.

Yes, we should certainly move out of investments where the cream of the return is going to financial advisors and rapacious institutions. Every pension fund I've ever seen underperforms the underlying investment over the long term for the simple reason that reams of intermediaries make a healthy living off doing nothing. Remember that a monkey could outperform every single fund because they get paid peanuts and don't pretend to apply any knowledge whatsoever.

Since I took control of my pension fund (seven years ago) I have consistently and massively outperformed any financial advisor I've ever come across, turning £12,000 into approximately £500,000. And I made my biggest gains from 2007 onwards.

Everyone should take control of their pension fund, however small, and stop paying middle men to do nothing but behave like a herd of suicidal lemmings.

Forex is a great place to start. Right now the euro is grossly overvalued against the £. Just get control of YOUR money, dive in and start trading. Because it's YOUR money you learn very quickly.

My advice is to read the articles on sites such as MarketWatch.com and THEN READ THE READERS COMMENTS. There's more sense in the comments than in the regurgitated claptrap the so called experts spout.

You can take my advice or not (I have no qualifications whatsoever). All I'm saying is that you'll be lucky to double your pension pool in a decade if you listen to the lemming "experts" and even worse if you trust them to actually manage your pool.

If you can double your money every year (a hard ask I grant you!) then in a decade you will have magically compounded it into over 1000 times its current value - £1 x 2 (double) x 10 (years) = £1024 therefore a £1000 starting fund would be worth over £1 million IF you could double it annually for ten years.

You'll probably not achieve this but I can absolutely guarantee that you won't if you trust fund managers, banks, financial advisors and the government!

One final recommendation - silver. Silver is artificially manipulated by governments and banks who sell "paper" silver to artificially keep the price down. As a result silver is below its sustainable mining level. In fact there is probably less above ground silver now than there is above ground gold (because we've been using up scrap silver that used to be the intrisic value of a coin - hence the UK monetary unit being sterling (silver).

Sterling used to actually be sterling silver (92.5% silver). What does the claptrap "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of one pound" on our paper notes actually mean? It used to mean that you could turn up to the Bank of England and exchange the promisory note for sterling silver. That's laughable now! Its a paper promise that isn't backed by anything and is open to the Bank of England simply pressing a button and creating £200,000,000,000 out of thin air (what its just done with quantitative easing). Try doing that with a currency based on silver or gold!

If you print more pieces of paper it makes the current ones worth less. That's why you can forget a holiday to Europe at the moment. It's also why my gold bullion (that can't be magically printed out of thin air) now buys double the number of pieces of paper, with the head of the richest women in the world printed on it, than it did a few months ago! It's just that there's more paper and still the same amount of gold - hence of course gold "buys" more paper.

At some point silver will be squeezed and banks will have to unwind their paper promises. If you are invested in a silver mine when and if this happens then you really will see fireworks.

A sipp can't hold physical silver (only gold bullion), because the government don't want to encourage the undermining of their paper promises, but it can hold mining companies. Silver has historically traded at a 15th the value of gold. At the moment it is trading at around a 65th the value of gold. The pointers are good that over the timescale of a pension saving silver will spike multiple times its current value.

And what is the downside? Limited, because the status quo is a mining company valued around its ability to be profitable at current price levels. If nothing happens to the price of silver then it isn't a disaster.

Use your own brain. Read up for yourself and then have the confidence to ignore the lemming "financial services" industry. Just ignore them and me! Just think for yourself! :think:

GOOD LUCK!

Interesting to see how you managed to turn £12,000 into £500,000.

But not everyone will have the knowledge or intelligence to do what you have, let alone have any idea of how to go about it.

What I dont like is how you seem to have tarnished the financial advice community with the same brush.

You must acknowledge that all advisers will not be allowed to take any up front commission from 2012 and therefore if they cannot display the "added value" that comes from fee based advice then frankly they will not survive post 2012.

One thing I would say is that your decisions are flying against the principle of financial common sense ie you are putting all your eggs in one basket. All of your investment decisions seem to have suceeded so far, but get it wrong and that £500,000 nest egg could easily be savaged.

System

Thanks for your post Smerch.

I had no idea what I was doing when I started - just a deep mistrust of what is clearly institutional financial manipulation.

Why do you think the big investment houses and banks make so much money? Because they're brilliant?

They make money because they have the clout to move prices by either buying or selling. They use derivatives and other financial instruments to take positions and then they move the market to their liking.

For example, at the moment gold will often fall hard on the day that gold futures are due to expire. Basically the big banks sell futures at say £1000 and then force down the price just prior to expiration by selling BIG. The future expires at say £900 (making them £100) and then they buy back again.

It all works fine until the huge overhang in derivative trading (paper promises) falls to bits. With regards to silver, the three big banks can sell almost as much silver in a month as physically exists. What they're actually selling, of course, is paper promises to buy or sell silver at a certain price sometime in the future.

Thanks to derivatives the banks can manipulate prices any way that suits them. At the moment (and for decades now) silver prices are below the mining break even levels to replace what is being used. It's a dead cert that eventually the banks won't be able to manipulate using their paper promises because there won't be any silver left! Sometime before silver runs out the whole derivative ponzi scheme will unfold and it will be financial Armageddon.

Exactly the same holds true for paper currencies. Most started off being backed by real stuff held in vaults and were guaranteed promises with real value. Now they're worthless other than the belief held by those exchanging the paper (you and me). That's the very definition of a ponzi scheme.

What's the point in listening to financial advisors? Markets move because of political manipulation and big money being applied by an extremely wealthy closed group of parasites.

When politics comes up against big money it's big money that normally wins. George Soros made £15 billion in one day by FORCING the UK out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism. It was basically a government determined to support the pound to keep it within an agreed EU trading range and big money repeatedly selling the pound at these supported levels.

Interest rates went up to try and make the pound more valuable and big money just kept selling. When Norman Lamont gave up trying to support it and reduced interest rates (gave in) the pound went into free fall and big money bought back all the pounds at way below the levels they'd sold at EARLIER IN THE DAY!

This was a big example of what happens every day - all the time. Turns in trend happen when the big boys (banks) think they've squeezed enough to force you and I to capitulate (give up). We sell out at lows because we can't sustain such losses and that's exactly when they suddenly switch and buy BIG.

If you look at any chart you'll normally see the peaks and troughs are characterised by sharp spike movements. A falling trend will suddenly drop even more dramatically and then rocket higher. This is just flushing out those sitting in front of their screens chewing through what remains of their nails.

If you are confident about a general point of view then hold to what you know is a basically good investment.

For example, the Euro is quite obviously overvalued against the pound. The pound is a walking disaster area but at least it's fallen hard. The Euro is also a walking disaster area but it hasn't fallen as hard as the pound. On my post of 11/03/2010 I made it quite clear that 91p to the Euro was ridiculous and it still is. In three months its dropped to 83p and I've made about 50% on the forex account allocated funds.

If you agree with me (and you may not) then understand that you're faced with central banks (countries) and banks (big money) manipulating the exchange rate to their own selfish benefit.

Understand that the way to invest in this hostile environment is to either just short the euro against the pound and wait, wait, wait. Or you can follow the trend and wait for the obvious manipulation against trend to give you good entry points.

It's just banks buying euros with pounds (actually they use paper promises to exert maximum gearing) ready to dump the lot (reverse the trade in a sudden switch) at a massive profit. You become one of those irritating people who sell them euros at their artificially high prices BEFORE they switch. At the moment I have no exposure to gbp/eur because we're in the pump part of the dump.

Of course, you can never time this right because the move in the market is entirely at their discretion. But what you can do is sell them euros when you see this manipulation unfolding and then resist being forced off - knowing full well that they'll spike it before reversing. When the change happens it often happens fast and in a big way.

Financial advisors are, in my opinion, all part of an investment con that does not serve those hard working people who just want to protect and save. The laws are changing BECAUSE it is a non-industry. Just take a look at the average £24,000 pension pot at retirement!

And don't believe a word of that twaddle they spew out about it being a sign that you should have saved more! My wife has been paying into a pension scheme all her life and it now stands at LESS than she paid in - so much for managed pension funds where you trust sharks with your savings. UTTER INCOMPETENCE if you ask me.

A monkey will outperform a paid financial advisor - honestly! Just take a look at any managed fund which tracks an underlying market. If you choose an FTSE tracker fund set the chart so that the managed tracker fund performance is compared against the FTSE as a whole. It will almost always show that the managed fund consistently falls behind the underling market. The reason is because the fund is being managed by people who provide no service but take a cut out of the money you invest (thereby reducing the fund value)

Provided the monkey makes no charge, he will outperform "professionals" if you just invest in whatever companies he sticks his finger in - allowing for averaging.

You may not like it but the entire financial services "industry" is a self serving parasite factory feeding off you and I. Fine if you don't like me saying it - that's up to you. You keep investing with them and see where it gets you - because what we've seen so far is tiny compared to the financial collapse coming. A financial collapse that, as per normal, will be trumpeted as "no-one could have predicted, etc".

Finally, at no point have I said that I put all my eggs in one basket. I've invested in silver mining shares, forex, physical gold in Zurich and London vaults, CFD's (keep it below £50,000) and a forest. With the exception of the forest I can be back in cash within minutes and try to keep as fluid as possible - moving in and out according to the current manipulations taking place.

However, if you have woken up and realised how dire your pension pot is, as I did, you've got to do something to try and make up for the years of creaming that the financial services industry have removed.

If I was in that situation and had a ten year time frame I wouldn't bother with spreading risk. I would look at where risk was at its minimum and potential rewards sufficient to give a chance of a semi comfortable retirement. What other choice has the financial services industry left to millions of people?

I'm not advising anyone but in my opinion silver has been disgracefully manipulated for about 50 years. The paper overhang in traded silver is WAY more than the silver that exists. If the banks are forced to unwind these paper promises silver will absolutely skyrocket and if they're not then silver is still priced at below replaceable mining levels.

I've got exposure to silver through mining shares (I'd rather hold the physical stuff but the government won't allow it for pension SIPPs because they have a vested interest in manipulating it down and their own worthless paper up) but have a risk spread - because it's important to me to protect what I've spent a great deal of time building up. Since my post on 11/03 Fresnillo has moved from upper £7's to over £10. Silver has moved from £363 to £407. Gold has moved from £23,500 to £28,000 a kg. So much for having missed the boat on gold which is what one financial advisor stupidly told one of her clients on this thread! As for the forest - well that's just intrinsically FAR more valuable than pieces of paper or metal!

I don't think you realise that £20,000 buys an annuity worth around £100 a month! That's a disaster and spreading risk at the expense of exposure to VERY high potential returns is, in my opinion, compounding the problem. But that's for the individual to decide.

Remember that if you invest in sterling (i.e. you just keep paper money in a bank or building society) you lost 25% against the dollar in one year. You can hold £20,000 and think its still worth £20,000 next year but it's really no more absolute than anything else. Silver and gold were money (portable stores of value) before empty paper promises proliferated. All you have to decide is what you want your "value" to be held in - what's good value to buy (exchange)?

Just for the sake of clarification I am not an expert, hold no qualifications, am not employed as an advisor and offer no advice, other than to say what I would do (and am doing). My whole ethos is to get out of the clutches of those who are rewarded by advising you and to start thinking for yourself. PLEASE THINK FOR YOURSELF and invest in whatever you feel comfortable with.

Would YOU invest YOUR money in BP? Some trumped up pensions advisors are prattling on about how BP's difficulties affect us all. NO THEY DON'T because plenty of us have ethics and don't let incompetent lemmings tie our future up in industries that are destroying our planet!

Forest, oil giant, forest, oil giant, forest, oil giant.....now what will it be.....?

FatMartinR

sihutchuk wrote: »

Forest, oil giant, forest, oil giant, forest, oil giant.....now what will it be.....?

But what are the mechanics of investing in a forest? You haven't said how to go about doing it. :question:

Nazrudin

Thank you sihutchuk for your very helpful posts. Very well said. And you were spot on with the euro against the £.