Imagine you’d been smart and put some cash into gold. You didn’t need to buy before the gold market took off. Buying gold at the start of last month will do fine. Six weeks on, your imaginary self now shows a profit of 14% in terms of the Dollar. Measured in Euros you stand some [...]
January 15th, 2008 | Adrian Ash | 7 comments | ContinuedArchive for Adrian Ash
City correspondent for The Daily Reckoning in London and formerly head of editorial at Fleet Street Publications Ltd, Adrian Ash has been studying and writing about the investment markets for the last 9 years. He is now head of research at BullionVault - giving you direct access to investment gold, vaulted in Zurich, on US$3 spreads and 0.8% dealing fees.
Jean Claude Trichet An Odd Choice for the FT Person of the Year
The Financial Times just chose Jean Claude Trichet – head of the European Central Bank (ECB) – as its “Person of the Year, 2007″. Okay, so Time magazine had to settle for Vladimir Putin – the former KGB spook now rehearsing his puppeteer skills at the Kremlin. But was the FT’s short-list really that bad? [...]
January 9th, 2008 | Adrian Ash | 0 comments | Continued
How to Make an Income from Gold
One of the big stumbling blocks for investors thinking about gold is that it doesn’t offer to pay any income. That’s why bone-headed gold schemes turn up like Simon Cowell at a botox clinic. But just as better living through chemistry can make you smile for a while, so “enhancing” the gold market looks doomed [...]
December 21st, 2007 | Adrian Ash | 1 comment | Continued
Interest rates are low but lenders won’t lend
It’s a cold & bitter truth that the world’s investment markets rarely act as sober as Britney Spears in a new wig. In fact, as John Maynard Keynes famously noted, they’re prone to stay much crazier for much longer than a right-minded investor can stay solvent. But is that really an excuse for the world’s [...]
December 20th, 2007 | Adrian Ash | 0 comments | Continued
Hope Now Seeks to Prolong Subprime Pain With Tax Funded Bandages
Hope now is a British-based charity, founded in 1985 to spread the good news of Jesus Christ, working primarily in the former Soviet state of Ukraine. Its recent good deeds include buying new boots for inmates at Stari Babbani Prison to wear when they’re breaking granite. At least those prisoners might hope for parole. But [...]
December 6th, 2007 | Adrian Ash | 2 comments | Continued
Riding the Gold Bull Market Carrying a Drunk Fat Man
The gold price just closed out November ’07 at an average of US$806.25 per ounce, a new record high – and the third record month on the run. Not that you’d know that from reading the newswires this weekend, however. And fair’s fair. The gold bull market has just collapsed after all… “I think you’ve [...]
December 5th, 2007 | Adrian Ash | 0 comments | Continued
The South Sea Bubble and the Northern Rock Bust
Dealing with a banking crisis used to be such a simple affair for the Bank of England – not least when the crisis rolled up at its own front door! Back in Sept. 1720, just as the South Sea Company was hurtling from bubble to bust – and hurtling into the history books as a [...]
November 23rd, 2007 | Adrian Ash | 2 comments | Continued
Price of Gold Drops, But Slump in Bond Yields Indicates Higher Prices Ahead
It’s been a tough week for anyone buying gold just below its all-time record high of $850 per ounce last Friday. By lunchtime this Thursday (Eastern Standard Time), the price of gold had dropped almost 8% from its 27-year high of $849 per ounce – and in only seven days. Even long-time gold investors, not [...]
November 19th, 2007 | Adrian Ash | 0 comments | Continued
Investing in Gold: An Ancient Relic That Pays You Nothing
What kind of an investment is gold – and just why are people investing in gold to the extent that it has pushed higher in 10 weeks out of the last eleven? Dubbed the No.1 “diversifier” by serious analysts and clued-up wealth managers alike, gold clearly stands outside the three asset classes held by most [...]
November 7th, 2007 | Adrian Ash | 3 comments | Continued
Gisele Bündchen Should Have Asked for Gold Coins Like Bette Midler
With all eyes now squinting at the fast-vanishing US currency, it was only ever a question of “when” – not “if” – the bold and the beautiful would start rejecting the mis-shapen Dollar. The imperial greenback is just sooooo 20th century, darling! “We don’t know what will happen to the Dollar,” as Patricia Bündchen, sister [...]
November 7th, 2007 | Adrian Ash | 3 comments | Continued
Gold Price Indicates British Pound Suffering From Worldwide Credit Crunch
What will it take for the mass of investors to wake up and buy gold? Are they still waiting for a new all-time high perhaps, even after watching the metal beat stocks and bonds for more than six years? Well, a new all-time high in the gold price just came for British investors. You might [...]
October 31st, 2007 | Adrian Ash | 0 comments | Continued
Goldman Sachs Escaped Subprime Collapse by Selling Subprime Bonds Short
Phew! That was close. For a moment there, it looked like the collapse of the subprime mortgage market was going to wipe billions off financial earnings for years to come. The bad debts were stacked up like poisoned berries gathered by a poison-crazed squirrel during the housing bubble of 2003-2006. Going bad – fast – [...]
October 19th, 2007 | Adrian Ash | 3 comments | Continued
The Commodities Market, the New Home for Failed Subprime Investors
Dig out your bell-bottoms and dust off your Doobie Brothers albums! This is where inflation stops hiding behind the official CPI data…and starts eating your cash savings and income alive. “More fund investment in agricultural markets in 2008,” says Lehman Brothers, now launching a “Pure Beta Index” to buy long-dated futures in 20 soft commodities… [...]
October 15th, 2007 | Adrian Ash | 0 comments | Continued
‘Death of Gold’ Claims Proven Wrong as Gold Price Surges Again
If what you think depends on where you sit, then in early 2000, the Oxford historian Niall Ferguson – like pretty much everyone else who pulled up a chair and took a look – sat two decades into the final demise of gold as a valuable asset. He wasn’t to know, of course, that gold’s [...]
October 10th, 2007 | Adrian Ash | 2 comments | Continued
UK Money Supply Has Tripled Since 1997
Thomas McAnea was a drunk, an ex-con freed on a technicality and a failed businessman with barely “two pennies” to rub together, according to the Scottish police. He was also an expert forger, a specialist in faking holograms for official documents. And in January, ‘Hologram Tam’ – as his underworld clients knew him – was [...]
October 9th, 2007 | Adrian Ash | 0 comments | Continued
