Liquidate entire portfolio until virus is over?

bowlhead99

EdGasketTheSecond said:

So having previously claimed Mike Maloney was only selling his book for $20 and having been proved wrong on that, you are now attacking the 204 reviews on GoodReads. That's pretty rich coming from someone who hasn't even read the book.

I didn't "claim" that he was "only selling his book for $20". It's over a decade old and you can get it for free these days if you don't want to pay for a paperback or kindle version.

I simply gave the example as part of a skit about someone buying his book after he had launched his gold store and thinking that the $20 cover price or whatever it was, was a nominal amount to 'secure their financial future', as is a seminar which he used to do alongside the rich dad poor dad folks, or the free lectures that help raise his profile to sell more books or seats at seminars, though ultimately the books and seminars (and latterly, videos) are tools to (a) drive traffic to his store and (b) get more people talking about gold and buying gold, supporting the price of gold, and some of them buying it from him.

you are now attacking the 204 reviews on GoodReads. That's pretty rich coming from someone who hasn't even read the book.

I'm not 'attacking' the reviews or individual reviewers. You said it wasn't a sales pitch and that incidentally it had a 4.2 /5  score on a book review site. I noted that it is probably not too difficult to get a high score on a book review site if you write entertainingly and seem to be giving good information, and your book is free. Here's the nine-word review from 'Dan': "Pessimism !!!!!!. Nothing new from this gold bug author".  He gave it four out of five. QED.

You say the book is not a sales pitch and that the accusation that it stimulates the demand for gold or drives traffic to his site is unjustified. You have the pdf version of the book, so in a pdf viewer you could do a quick text search. How many times does goldsilver.com appear? Is it more than twenty or less than twenty? If significantly less than twenty, say just one or two, it would be easier for me to believe that it's probably not a sales pitch and he is just mentioning it incidentally without trying to burn it into readers' minds.

So you think my post on MSE has spread virally and will cause gold to rise from $1500 to £1600? Seriously? Only a few people read these posts and it will have absolutely no effect whatsoever on the gold price; rest easy on that one.

As you know, 'going viral' is terminology used when concepts or links are forwarded around from place to place and propogate around the internet from place to place over email or social media across networks and countries. His large number of youtube vids have 50million combined views. You saw it, liked it, shared it with another few thousand MSE forum users who might otherwise not have been aware of it. You said "Maloney has made no money from me". My observation was that you had bought into the mindset and participated in spreading it virally, so that although Maloney doesn't count you as a direct paying customer, you are helping his cause. 

Next, without knowing anything about me, you make what can only be considered a personal attack i.e. that I am some schmuck falling for a sales pitch and have just now got into gold. Listen I bought my first Krugerand and gold stocks back in the 70's when you were probably still on Janet & John Book 1 of Keynsian economics.

You can call it a personal attack if you want, though it's nothing personal. I'm simply warning others not to fall for sales pitches while noting that you seem to have fallen for it. Maybe you bought a krugerrand in the 70s and your current desire to move 70% into gold and silver is just the culmination of a lifelong dream as you are no longer needing any growth, and you have got to that position and view entirely independently of the agenda that Maloney is pushing.  But when I asked for evidence that equity prices were now in a bubble, it was the Maloney video you presented as the support for your view, so I thought that's where you were getting your views, i.e. you had drunk his Kool-Aid.

So you have a 'finance' degree and have met with a few CEO's, WOW. Mike Maloney has lectured around the world including with country leaders. If all he had to offer was a sales pitch for some dodgy gold site do you really think important people would want to listen to that? Would a finance minister in Russia be asking for a signed copy of his book after a lecture there?

If there is one certainty about politicians in emerging market economies, they are not shy about ingratiating themselves with visiting celebrities at conferences, nor about asking for free stuff.

Whether Mike is a salesman or not, the arguments and points he makes can still be judged and stand on their own merit but you can't take 30 minutes to respond to that. However you do seem to have 30 minutes for a diatribe against what you already admit you have not investigated. Why not be intelligent and answer the points Mike makes?

Mike has hours and hours of content and has been beating the same drum since he opened his gold store, wrote a piece for Rich Dad and then started to promote it through the Rich Dad circuit, his own book and later video content. I'm broadly aware of his mindset and the types of data he uses selectively to make his point.

While I'm happy to reply to your own comments - as engaging in discussion can be rewarding on all sides - I am not going to sit through a half hour video and then spend hours narrating a point-by-point commentary to 'answer the points he makes'. As he has a one-sided view of the world, it would require me to fill in the gaps from all the other viewpoints. That would take a very long time, and as he does this for a living he can take a week or a month to write a script for his video, mostly regurgitating stuff he has said hundreds of times before, while I don't have that luxury. And he's not here to answer any points I were to make if I challenged him on it.

So I've taken the view that there is nothing to be gained by me seeking an education from a cultist, nor by dissecting the argument of a cultist, who has literally no reason to change his mind even if robustly challenged, and who is not here to be engaged with, in any case. People will buy what he is selling them, whether I comment on it or not.  However, I believe it's important to caution that people who do watch his content ensure that they seek out other viewpoints not expressed within it - as having a highly selective education can be more damaging than not having one and just figuring it out on your own.

We each have our views and a right to express them but don't try and make yourself look superior bowlhead99 because you just end up looking foolish.

You were criticising me for not watching the marketing video or reading the book produced by goldsilver.com which would educate me about why assets were overvalued and how investment in gold and silver would secure my future. Any reference to my own background, education or years of business and finance experience was only given as a reference point for why I didn't want to invest another half hour receiving an economics lesson from someone who runs a gold trading business whose job title is alternately 'Youtube Sensation' and 'Lecturer on Why You Should Always Buy Gold and Silver because Everything Else is Doomed'.

To be honest, I am surprised that nobody picked up the slight typo when I mentioned I wasn't going to watch the video because I wouldn't appreciate the level of education I'd be able to get from a 'self-interested cult'...

bowlhead99

worldtraveller said:

Anything more is probably skipped, or maybe glanced at with glazed eyes, and/or is often, and increasingly so, viewed as completely off topic!

Go figure!

When a topic gets to 500+ comments, I think it's certainly fair game to be taken down whatever roads it goes .  Hopefully OP is not receiving an email notification every time a further comment gets added! The issue of the covid-19 impact on markets is also being bashed around on loads of other threads, so whether we should 'liquidate entire portfolio until virus is over' is something that has had more than enough coverage - probably not a lot of need to track back to the original topic.

Prism

Bowlhead has convinced me that Mike Maloney is indeed marketing his gold trading website and I shall be avoiding. I would instead recommend heading over to the Fundsmith website and watching Terry Smith's annual shareholder meeting videos for an unbiased view of the 'true' path to investment riches.

kinger101

123mat123 said:

I really enjoy reading almost all the opinions on here and I think we all know who the heavy lifters are in terms of content....
But really, enough on gold already.....

Could be worse.  It could be silver.  Or technical analysis.

kinger101

EdGasketTheSecond said:
So you have a 'finance' degree and have met with a few CEO's, WOW. Mike Maloney has lectured around the world including with country leaders. If all he had to offer was a sales pitch for some dodgy gold site do you really think important people would want to listen to that? Would a finance minister in Russia be asking for a signed copy of his book after a lecture there?

In fact all you have to do according to him is a bit of 'rebalancing' and it'll all be just fine.

We each have our views and a right to express them but don't try and make yourself look superior bowlhead99 because you just end up looking foolish.

It really doesn't matter who's met who. But I don't really care for Mike Baloney, or anyone else giving lectures. One does need to ask why he needs to spend so much time writing books and giving lectures if he's made so much from gold.  

The simple truth is, investing in precious metals is too high risk for most people.  And as long term investment, it has historically sucked.  
https://www.macrotrends.net/2608/gold-price-vs-stock-market-100-year-chart

Owning a diversified pool of assets matched against ones attitude and capacity for risk, with the lowest possible fund charges is stellar advice for the overwhelming majority of people.  Nobody is going on a lecture circuit with that one line of advice.  It's too boring.  Too short.  And too safe.

EdGasketTheSecond

The gold price was fixed for much of that time. So it depends if you are looking at recent times or not:

"Over the past 15 years, the price of gold has increased by 278%, roughly the same as the 30-year return. Over the same period, the DJIA increased by 173% and the 10-year Treasury note returned 65%, which are both significantly lower than their 30-year returns."

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/020915/has-gold-been-good-investment-over-long-term.asp

Plus there has not been QE until after 2008 which changes the game plan for inflation and currency devaluation; both very favourable to gold.

bowlhead99

EdGasketTheSecond said:

The gold price was fixed for much of that time. So it depends if you are looking at recent times or not:

"Over the past 15 years, the price of gold has increased by 278%, roughly the same as the 30-year return. Over the same period, the DJIA increased by 173% and the 10-year Treasury note returned 65%, which are both significantly lower than their 30-year returns."

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/020915/has-gold-been-good-investment-over-long-term.asp

This is why it is futile to argue with a gold bug cultist.

Sorry, you seem to be billing the fact that gold's 15 year return is the same as its 30 year return, as some kind of positive thing?

So gold was ~$420 thirty years ago in 1990, and fifteen years later it was still $420, because it was absolutely terrible at protecting against the fifteen years of inflation, and then it went up in price dramatically from 2005 to 2020, leaving it in a position that its 15 year return is no better than its 30 year return. And that's better than investing in productive industry is it?

As investopedia reminds us, DJIA increased by only 173% from mid Feb 2005 to mid Feb 2020. However, the DJIA index of 30 megacap stocks pays dividends, while a lump of metal does not. The 173% is the return a DJIA investor would have got if every time they had received a dividend from one of the thirty stocks, they had thrown it in the bin.

If instead they had reinvested the dividend in the basket of index stocks because they didn't want to cash out (like the gold investor didn't want to cash out), their total return from Feb 2005 to Feb 2020 would have been about the same as the gold investor, at around 280%.

Except unlike gold investors, the stocks investors didn't have a dead 15 years leading up to that 15 years. They made decent returns, because they were invested in productive businesses rather than inert metal that doesn't produce an income and costs money to store and insure. Over the thirty years to Feb 2020 when the investopedia article was written, the DJIA returned about a thousand percent. Except that's still the 'if you throw the dividends in the bin' return; the actual 30-yr total return (dividends reinvested) of the DJIA was over two thousand percent.

You can say that this high return for DJIA compared to gold is because stocks are overvalued, but really it's because stocks are ownership interests in businesses which make annual profits and share in the economic output of societies, which over 30 years will give you a significant reward for investment risk and grow your wealth - while gold is an element, a piece of metal which just sits there as a risk for your insurance company.

kinger101 said:

123mat123 said:

I really enjoy reading almost all the opinions on here and I think we all know who the heavy lifters are in terms of content....
But really, enough on gold already.....

Could be worse.  It could be silver.  

Lest you think I'm only having a go at gold bugs rather than silver bugs, I could quote from Mike Maloney who runs goldsilver com, and counts EdGasketTheSecond among his fans. In 2015 when doing a preface to a new edition of his book, he gave his background information: "In 2002 I discovered that gold was severely undervalued and started buying after it broke the $300 barrier. By April of the following year I discovered how undervalued silver was compared to gold and started buying silver when it was still under $5, and I have been buying ever since. In 2005 I started an online precious metals dealership".

Well done for identifying that silver was undervalued compared to gold in 2003, when $350 gold was 75-80x the $4.50 silver price per ounce. When doing your updated book preface in summer 2015, $1180 gold is still 75-80x the $16 silver price. This week $1600 gold is 110x the silver price. I guess it will eventually come back to 10x like he has claimed before, when postulating $15000 gold and $1500 silver to a baying mob in one of his sermons. I mean seminars.

As Maloney put it, "once the inventory/usage ratio has bottomed, it is flashing a buy signal, and unlike previous cycles it isn't possible for this ratio to go any lower than it is, in fact is so absurdly low that it's unbelievable the public hasn't already realised how magically undervalued silver is, and it's absolutely astounding that bazillions of dollars haven't already flowed toward silver. No I take that back, it's not unbelievable at all, the public always chases yesterday's news.... gold is cheap as dirt now, silver's cheaper than dirt".

Well, he said silver was far too cheap in 2004 when he 'started buying it and never stopped', (when it was 75-80th the price of gold), and mentioned it was still 'magically undervalued' when publishing his book in 2008 trying to convince others to buy silver (when it was 75-80th the price of gold), and again when doing his new intro to his book in 2015 (when it was 75-80th the price of gold), and this month it's 110-120th the price of gold. When oh when will the public realise how magically undervalued it is!

worldtraveller

CLOSING NUMBERS FROM YESTERDAY:

FTSE 100 @ 5,415 - DOWN 29% FROM PEAK

FTSE 250 @ 14,099 - DOWN 36% FROM PEAK

FTSE ALL SHARE @ 2,958 - DOWN 31% FROM PEAK

DOW JONES @ 21,053 - DOWN 29% FROM PEAK

NASDAQ @ 7,373 - DOWN 25% FROM PEAK

EdGasketTheSecond

Ah bowlhead99, good to see you educating yourself some more.

But you did not fully quote my post, and the last bit is key:

"Plus there has not been QE until after 2008 which changes the game plan for inflation and currency devaluation; both very favourable to gold."

It is the excessive, and now exponential, increase in QE that is a game changer. The reason why equities, real estate, and bonds are in an inflated bubble, and the reason why gold will benefit more now than ever before from the upcoming financial tsunami.

Do you really think this time is different to the thousands of years of history when devaluation of currency has always preceeded economic collapse? When that happens fiat currency always has a reckoning and reset to gold. This time that could mean a gold price anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000 USD per ounce.

People think the coronavirus is the problem but it is just the 'pin'. The pin that has pricked the inflated bubbles of equities, real estate, and this time bonds also. The real problem, (economically speaking) has been interventionalist and reckless government meddling in the economy. The 2008 crash was just a precurser to what is to come, and no lessons have been learnt since then and none of the policies since that time have helped, they have only made matters worse.

You can 'rebalance' all you like but you are simply shuffling deck chairs on a sinking ship.

imho Gold will benefit from the upheaval, quickly followed by silver (to bring the gold - silver ratio back down to a more historic average), then gold stocks, then maybe a year or so after that a move back into stocks and real estate generally. That assumes we will survive the upcoming looting, rioting, and inevitable shortages of basics like food; yes I think it could get that bad.

Michael121

EdGasketTheSecond said:

Ah bowlhead99, good to see you educating yourself some more.

But you did not fully quote my post, and the last bit is key:

"Plus there has not been QE until after 2008 which changes the game plan for inflation and currency devaluation; both very favourable to gold."

It is the excessive, and now exponential, increase in QE that is a game changer. The reason why equities, real estate, and bonds are in an inflated bubble, and the reason why gold will benefit more now than ever before from the upcoming financial tsunami.

Do you really think this time is different to the thousands of years of history when devaluation of currency has always preceeded economic collapse? When that happens fiat currency always has a reckoning and reset to gold. This time that could mean a gold price anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000 USD per ounce.

People think the coronavirus is the problem but it is just the 'pin'. The pin that has pricked the inflated bubbles of equities, real estate, and this time bonds also. The real problem, (economically speaking) has been interventionalist and reckless government meddling in the economy. The 2008 crash was just a precurser to what is to come, and no lessons have been learnt since then and none of the policies since that time have helped, they have only made matters worse.

You can 'rebalance' all you like but you are simply shuffling deck chairs on a sinking ship.

imho Gold will benefit from the upheaval, quickly followed by silver (to bring the gold - silver ratio back down to a more historic average), then gold stocks, then maybe a year or so after that a move back into stocks and real estate generally. That assumes we will survive the upcoming looting, rioting, and inevitable shortages of basics like food; yes I think it could get that bad.

If gold was going to move as much as you think, wouldn't it be impossible for normal people to buy gold right now? Don't you think the super rich would have bought every last speck of it already. You can't tell me normal people like ourselves know more than what the banks know. Sounds like your a bit of a conspiracy theorist, if that was true wouldn't you think the big boys are already ahead of the game and wouldn't leave any gold for the likes of the public.
 
Investing in stocks is completely new to me, actually I made a thread not to long ago asking if I should use vanguard lifestrategy just before the 30% drop, luckily enough I waited and didn't put my money in till late march around a few percent off the low. Now I read your posts and I see trading gurus on YT with their own website claiming the s and p 500 is gonna hit 1500 levels and I wonder if I should have waited longer before I bought in, but at the same time I cant help but think doomsdayers like yourself was screaming from the top of their lungs that 2012 was the end of the world so im not gonna sell my shares. But I do hope your all so wrong not because im worried about my money in shares but more about where my income is coming from and for family and friends with a mortgage to pay for.