You need to be careful about the correlation between lolsilver and other lolassets. During a lolcrash correlations all tend towards a value of 1.00.

Anyone ever wonder what it's like for the lolsilver bugs when doomsday doesn't come? I knew one of the 2012 dudes, met him in Arizona. This guy was CONVINCED that the world was going to stop spinning on the current axis, and then kick into reverse and spin the other way as the world ended. I asked him what he'd do if it didn't actually happen, and he said he wouldn't know how to handle it. It was just too impossible of a notion he believed it so strongly. So I'm dying to know how silver bugs and bunker guys could handle a life of dumping money into protecting themselves, only to die never seeing the bomb/zombies/whatever. That must be brutal for them. I'd imagine that some loners leave bunkers full of stuff that people must find 20+ years later while hiking or something.

So now I am getting lolz.

The cycles in question are like 5k and 25k year cycles. Anyone who knows anything about cycles knows that they are not exact. They ebb and flow. A woman doesn't have her period on the exact same day every month. Cicadas don't come on the exact same day every 14 years or w.e., etc.

With cycles of this length a variance of decades would be perfectly reasonable.

Plenty of people are ignorant. But the bunker and silver bugs are no more so than the index buy and hold crowd...

P.S. I don't think the world is going to end. But cycles are very powerful.

Here is a really good intro to the subject: http://www.amazon.com/Cycles-Mysteri...s=dewey+cycles

I bought this book for like $10 a handful of years ago. Looks AMZNs algos say you can't get it under $50 anymore.

In the long run, we're all dead.

Speak for yourself

The cool thing about predicting the end of the world is that you get unlimited do-overs.

It can always come tomorrow.

Time for another bump. The last week we'd had a crash in equities, lots of fear, China getting destroyed, and expansionary monetary policy.

What happened? Silver has been making new lows and is down a further 3.5% today.

A little lesson for you guys, now you can see it in action (since you learned nothing from 2008): silver is a protection against absolutely nothing. It under performs greatly during bulls and it gets sold off like everything else during bears.

And in the long run it greatly under performs productive assets in all scenarios. Why would you own it?

It pretty

There is an ignorant element out there that loves silver that has a working class, anti-authority vibe to it. Those people never become the big winners in society. There is a whole other element out there like the Peter Schiffs of the world, who have some basic ideas correct, but are almost always wrong on how events play out in the world, and they are totally clueless as to how investors react, and how group/crowd psychology works in markets.

It is not possible to be more wrong on what would happen after the crisis than Peter Schiff. Same with Jim Rogers. I will still watch Peter Schiff's rants, if only to have him say Bernakke a few times. The guy has never pronounced it correctly ever, as he always forgets the second N. Of course, Yellen is the chair now, but it is stunning that he says it wrong, and it just goes to show you how unflexible he is. I can pretty much give his same speech at this point. Jim Rogers is worse. He was so so wrong on commodities, that I cannot watch him anymore. I could state his speech word for word, as well.

we're only 71% off the highs, lol bears

Werewolves.

The downside to a post like this, is when you're proven right, the people who were wrong just disappear. The upside; at least I talked my Aunt into selling her silver when she got caught up in it. So overall I guess it was still worth stating my opinion and getting flamed.

My real fear is our economy seems to have turned into this bubble/bust world, and I can't see the next bubble Is it bonds? That would SUCK! Is it real estate 2.0, the return of my stress? (china having ghost towns, lots of US housing issues still, other countries have ridiculous prices and they need to be popped)

I honestly don't know (maybe the bubble era is over?) but I'd LOVE to hear some people's input. (or maybe my bubble era assumption is incorrect and a few bubbles don't make an "era" and I'm just being a drama queen) Don't know, would love some input though

Oh man watching it burn today is so so nice

OMG OMG silver now has given back half of it's gains on SPX since '00! Roll out the presses!

Classic posts, claiming silver and gold can never outperform. They have for the last 15 years and by a fairly large margin. Lol, SPX hasn't even taken back half its losses against gold since the ratio bottomed in '11.

Hi guys,

So I am one of the crazy silver bug Peter Schiff listeners.

I am not a trader...I know enough about it that I don't have the time to spend trying to gain an edge there by outsmarting all the other smart people/computers trying to gain an edge, while overcoming transaction fees. For me, it's as simply as looking at managed mutual funds vs. index funds: The index funds always seems to outperform the majority of the mutual funds, to the extent that it seems entirely feasible to me that the ones who do outperform are simply on the good end of variance. If the professionals running these funds can't outperform the market, what chance do I have? I am not saying it is impossible to make money in the long run as a trader, just that I expect it takes a vast amount of time/knowledge that I do not have. So I am saying all this to point out that I am not buying or selling silver as a short term trade, but doing so because I believe it is fundamentally undervalued in dollars, the currency I am exchanging for it.

The arguments Peter Schiff makes make sense to me. His argument for silver/gold is that the dollar is in a bubble that will someday burst and these are good hedges against that specific event. We are 5+ years into the recovery and yet it seems like the economic numbers still are not good on an absolute scale, despite years of 0% interest rates and multiple rounds of QE.

Schiff claims that there has been inflation as a result of these policies, but that it has been directed towards asset bubbles (stocks, bonds and housing) and exported to countries we have a trade deficit with. Essentially, the net flows are that they send us goods, keeping inflation suppressed in our country and increasing inflation in their country, while we send them bonds in exchange. But someday, this will reverse when the asset bubbles burst and the other countries want to trade in their IOUs for actual goods. All of this seems to make good sense.

His claim is that the Fed will never be able to normalize interest rates without pricking the asset bubbles it has created. So far, they have not done so, and until they do so, it seems premature to call him incorrect. Additionally, he says that they will eventually have to do QE4 to keep the asset bubbles inflated (just like he said they would have to do 2 and 3). While he was laughed out of the room when he first started saying QE4, now it seems more mainstream people are starting to consider it might happen.

Not only does Schiff make sense to me in regard to currencies and commodities but also in other areas he discusses. He just seems like a really bright guy who understands economics really well.

I'm not a stupid guy. I took a handful of economics classes in college and got an A+ in all of them. I didn't really understand some of the Keynesian ideas such as inflation being a good thing for the economy, but I had a really good grasp of the fundamental ideas of supply and demand, etc. In other areas of life, I have had success: I am a CPA by profession and I am really good at poker.

I'm not trying to brag, I just feel like the response I often get when I express my opinions is "ur dumb" which just clearly is not true. What Schiff talks about just jives with me. Yes, I have lost some paper wealth in my silver/gold ownership over the last several years. But I'm sticking with it until I hear someone come up with some arguments that seem better than the ones Schiff makes. I continue to add to my position.

If only Peter Schiff had a reason to be long metals...

It's also not like he predicted $5000 gold....

Right, I know he sells gold and silver and realize he has a motive to get people excited about buying them.

But the point is that the arguments he makes seem to make good logical sense. Maybe some of his conclusions have not come to fruition (yet), but the fundamental logic seems sound. And I'm a logical guy. When I was learning to play poker, I focused on learning from the people with analysis that made good logical sense. I learned to stay away from results-oriented thinking. So when I look at silver, I focus on the logic behind what is going on, not the results. To continue the poker analogy, I believe I am still in the downswing but that my fundamental game is sound.

Why is undervalued in "dollars" and not bread? Platinum? Pork bellies?

Unless you think every commodity is hugely undervalued, there is no reason to be long silver.

How are they hedges to a dollar collapse? You think the world will suddenly go back to gold in hyperinflation?

If anything, if ever that extremely unlikely event does occur, money will flow to whatever digital money or alternative is around the time - like some like IBM's project.

The world is becoming increasingly interrelated, and when one assets starts to suck, it will simple be transferred into another, of which there are many.

WTF are you talking about? The US is powering. Corporate profits are fabulous, unemployment is half what it was, inflation is low. GDP just came in at 3.9%. Go walk outside, talk to people, talk to companies and tell me the economy is the same as 2009. It's a world apart.

Sure it makes sense, but it's been going on for many decades and working just fine.

Markets have corrected brutally many times, and the US has continued to power along.

Bright really has little to do with whether is a guy is wrong, or nuts, or blind.

Inflation is a good thing for the economy because it punishes people for sitting on wealth rather than putting to use. It encourages people to make bets on things which will produce future wealth. It transfers wealth from the economically unproductive to the economically productive/energetic. That's all. And that transfer is a good thing.

I'm curious why you found this concept difficult.
People who are moderately to quite intelligent with a good amount of faith in their own minds are drawn to people like Schiff. He's clearly bright, talks plainly, makes sense, is against the orthodoxy (of which you're rightly slightly suspicious - experts don't know a tenth of what they project, and most of what they do know is wrong).

Doesn't mean Schiff isn't a dickhead though.

You can be intelligent and miss a few keys concepts that make you have silly blind spots. There are very few people who are smart enough to avoid all the pitfalls of thinking.

Dude, you haven't lost paper wealth. You've lost real wealth. Gold and silver have lost a lot of value relative to anything you might want - food, real estate, power tools, guns, shirts, a handbag for your girlfriend, water bills. You are a substantially poorer person today than if you'd simply bought the index of the S&P 500. Substantially - over three times as poor.

To put it in simpler terms, had you bough the S&P 500, your stack of physical gold would be 3x larger. That's not a trivial mistake - that's a massive mistake. Don't try to downplay the fact that you made a massive mistake buying gold instead of productive assets.

Could you please summarize Schiff in your own words? I'll gladly tear it apart.

Thanks for the thoughtful response, Tooth. I look forward to responding although it probably won't be until tonight as I need to get to work.

Dude, why would you bother to respond?

You're not going to change his mind. He doesn't even realize how much the metals have outperformed the indices for the last 15 years. He can't comprehend how they are an asset that anyone would ever own. He's dimwitted. Don't waste your time. Their is a time and place to own everything, if he can't figure that out he is a fool. Don't suffer one so easily.

Lol, the squeeze is on as we speak. Another brilliant fist pump bottom call by the investing fish.

I may be crazy here, but did you not basically choose the only time horizon that suited your argument? 15 years is exactly the window where you can make your claim (and I actually have to check to see if what you're saying is even true). But on every other longer or shorter time horizon, it's blown out of the water. It's stocks, not even close.

Go and have a look at my detailed reasoning in years past on why silver was an uber-******ed buy and likely to decline, vs pretty much every single silver bug in this thread. Does being right count for nothing?

Of course I can comprehend it. It's shiny, it avoids the (centrally controlled) financial system, it's physical (meaning that if everything breaks down, you have something of actual value), it has a long history of reliable value (millenia, far longer than dollars), it holds value rather than being less and less valuable like fiat, it's not subject to end-stage inflation shocks, devaluation and ultimate worthlessness such as happened in Argentina, it's not some entry in a bank account that anyone can simply take or freeze or steal.

How am I doing? I get it perfectly. And all of those things are true. Very wealthy people buy it as a small hedge for that, and it's a perfectly valid thing to do when you have lots of money.

But the above doesn't apply to most people. The real reason most people buy it is because they're ****ing idiots who think:

a) US debt and printing is unsustainable and will lead to collapse (it won't).
b) it's going to jump to the moon when the debt system or the dollar comes undone (it won't)
c) it's going to protect your wealth when everything comes apart, or in doomsday type scenarios (it won't, it'll be worthless)
d) It'll appreciate during a crash (it won't, it'll go down too)
e) It's cheap yo! (it's not, historically)
f) It's safer and has probable better return than stocks (total nonsense, it massively underperforms stocks and is one of the worst investing mistakes a person can make, long term)
g) It's "real" money (wtf does that even mean?)
h) **** the government, yo! They abandoned the gold standard and just print fake money!

It's really the above that I'm arguing with. Silver/gold is a perfectly good small-percentage backup for a wealthy person. The poor/average are far better off owning productive assets, as small amounts of silver aren't going to buy you anything if things go south, and holding them will destroy your future wealth vs being in productive assets such as stocks.

How's your gold long going?