question: do "institutional investors" invest on behalf of retail investors? i.e. are brokerage houses institutional investors or are institutional investors solely hedge funds with pretty full autonomy (or any market participant with pretty full autonomy)?

yes, i know.

come on dont help him. i liked the XOM comparison too much.

oops, i wasn't implying you were being results oriented of course, just was clarifying it for others since a lot of people incorrectly think everyone investing in gold is just a gold bug and being results oriented. gold could drop $200 tomorrow but as long as we've got ben bernanke at the helm, obama in office, and the mentality in Washington that we need to keep people spending, i'll be sleeping well at night

lol.

buddy of mine has been killing it w/ his mkt short and his firm is gunna make its name (well, as much of a name as it'll make) off of his calls :-). i'm proud to say he's a student of mine lol.

we're gunna be doing some research together soon so you may be getting some pms if i think it's worth the time :-).

Thinly veiled....

They wont tell you cause its not that good.

They will, however, rant and rave and tell you how dumb you are.

Oh jesus, you guys can be hard headed sometimes. Do you think "institutional investors" invest on behalf of retail investors? Yes. You are (I could be wrong here) trying to hand wave the fact that managed money makes the transactions for the retail investors so that makes GLD and SLV a retail investment etf. I would say, what are you trying to prove, is ridiculous because the same goes for XOM.

So your point is GLD, SLV and XOM are retail products... genius.

Paulson owns over 17% of GLD but his customers are retail investors. Your point is a non-point.

Did you even read this...

Part 4. There are many facets to gold and silver price discovery, SLV and GLD are not significant in the auction of gold and silver prices as we know them. For the sake of time and for the sake of similarity, i will discuss silver. How would increased investment demand into SLV drive up the silver price... simple, it wouldn't.

We will start with the trading action in New York City, this is called the New York Standard price. The price of silver is discovered on the COMEX exchange through open outcry and prices are immediately transmitted around the world. The COMEX daily settlement price is set by a sub-commitee of COMEX members shortly after the close. Before any of this happens trading is opened and prices of the London Fix are set by the LBMA twice daily (AM and PM). Clients place order with a deal in contact with the three LBMA fixing members or with the members themselves. Then you have the Tokyo Commodity Exchange, the Shanghai Futures Exchange, Hong Kong, South Africa etc, Tokyo being the most prominent of this last group. In addition to these more formal exchanges, the price of silver is also set in the OTC market for spot, forward and options. This is a global 24 hour market cleared through the LBMA. Institutional bullion trading desk also have influence on the price of precious metals, SLV and GLD traders do not.

All you can do is provide some loose anecdotal drivel of how it was retail investors who were driving the price of silver up.

But it doesn't work like that. your anecdotal "fantasy" is just that. A lot of retail investors in the gold pit now-a-days...lol.

Provide more than the loose anecdotal drivel next time please...

What the bears are best at.

Since the dishonest/stupid/ignorant gold bugs like to complain that 30 years of owning gold at a 30% loss in real terms isn't long enough, let's go back to 1950 and 1930.

Since 1950, Gold has risen from $35 to ~$1700. That's a 6.68% return in gross terms. Inflation* has been 3.8% over that time frame, taking the real return down to 2.88% over 60 years.
This is before the approximately 1% storage and 1% insurance costs. [Which would have been higher from 1950-90]. Feel free to use your own costs.

Since 1950 the S+P 500 has risen 55,454% with dividends reinvested. Five five comma four five four percent. The dishonest lunatic bugs of course try to compare without dividends, as if they magically vanished.

That's a CAGR of 10.9% gross, or 7.1% in real terms. Go ahead and do the math of 7.1% compounded over 60 years vs 2.88% [minus costs].
It's 61x real return for stocks vs 5.5 times for gold NOT Including costs of gold AND including expenses for the mutual funds/indices.

Or you could have bought the Windsor Fund and earned 11.3% since the 50s. Etc.

But, of course SIXTY years is not long enough the buggies will whine. Let's go back to 1930! In 1930, Gold was $21, so has returned 5.65% gross since then.

I'll penalize stock funds, and do the calculations from before the Crash so they are starting at bubble-like levels:
CGM mutual fund has returned 8.7% since then.
Putnam has returned 11.9% since then.
Pioneer equity fund has a total return of 156,248% since 1928. That's not a typo.

They returned 10-60x the return of gold, before gold's storage and insurance costs. [All equity funds are net of expenses, of course.]

Inflation was ~3.2% over that time frame, so a net 2.4% return for gold vs 5.5% for CGM. Stock funds did over 11x better in real terms over an 80-year period, using the worst of my 3 examples. {I picked the first 3 off a random list of funds that pre-dated the Great Crash.} Obviously, you can pick the Dow or SPX and get similar results.

EL OH EL

Who in this thread has said to hold on to gold/ silver forever? I haven't. Like, I've said countless times before there are times to own gold and times to sell it.

You realize your still making the same asnine arguement.

See silly.

No, it is obvious that you are cherry picking your time frame peak to trough.

If this is not obvious to you.. get a check up.

Since 1950...lmao. Even the the most bearish are not dumb enough to use gold when it was money and when the price was fixed by the gov.

1833- 1930 the fixed price of gold never strayed 10 cents from $20.65/oz. From 1931-1968 the price of gold never got above $40/oz and spent most of it's time around $35/oz as fix increased.

When gold was not money, the price of gold was $40.80.

100,000oz of gold after it was declared = $4,080,000
100,000oz of gold now = $175,990,000

See what happens when you cherry pick the other way, the exact opposite argument is correct.

Truth is, it is sad you resort with such petty, intentional blindness. What is real here, is the obvious shift from paper to hard assets. It is also obvious we are in a hard asset cycle right now.

This.

I have been arguing with tards like Najdorf since 2007, when gold rallied from $650 to $800 I heard the same sh**. If you fed your ego any more it would take you over.... too late.

Haha... refreshing.

You gold bears are just as bad as the all out stock doomers... the market will crash one day. No sh**. One of these years gold will go down in value... quite a revelation you have blessed us with.

literally stopped reading here. lol, talk about missing the point entirely. people aren't arguing that 30 years isn't long enough, they're saying that cherry picking a 30 year time frame and using that to argue against people who became bullish in the past 5-10 years when recognizing a bull market emerging, is just silly. how about we compare gold as money to the dollar as money? or we can cherry pick stats all day as MMR just illustrated

yeah, apparently looking at cherry picked returns from 50 years ago to now is a better investment approach for going forward than looking at anything current. someone should also average out the top stocks based on performance for the past 50 years and just plunk some money into those.

What's all this talk about cycles. You mean a good investment isn't always good? I'm only interested in top performing assets over past 1000 years personally, biggest sample size = most reliable data = most reliable return.

HAHA. 1000 years. Ya, I would say that is suffcient. I know a guy who invested in Jesus Inc. like 5000 years ago.

MADE. A. KILLING.

too soon

It is for N-defense he trades on a 400 million year time frame. You should have seen the values during the jurassic period.

T-Rex's were selling so cheap you could get them for pennies on the dollar.

A thread has jumped the shark when you start trying to put a valuation on T-Rex's idk

But this was only one millennium before the Velociraptors suffered a massive sell off and long before the cave man council fixed the T-rex to rounded stone ratio.