Euro Pacific ?

[Mega]

Ok Team Stocks sold, need to know if anyone knows what Peter S track record is like. Is there any way i can find out how his investers have done over the last 5 years?
Mike

[Guest]

Re: Euro Pacific ?

Mega -

What I think about Euro-Pac, and why I lost 40% initially on a portfolio placed with them 4 years ago had everything to do with the point in the market when I jumped in, and little or nothing to do with them as a brokerage or advisor.

They placed me into a portfolio of natural reasource and high dividend stocks right literally at the start of the cyclical correction down coming off the 2003 market peaks - OUCH!! - which primarily were a correction of the Gold bull market's first really strong upleg.

When I "complained" that that portfolio had dropped 40 % in the first year after P. Schiff recommended it, they said "tough on you" and "if you can't accept the adverse turn you should not be in commodity stocks".

I found a couple of their brokers to be really gratuitously nasty tongued stuffed shirts, and curiously those brokers had a falling out with Peter and left that outfit shortly thereafter. I did not like them, but fundamentally they were probably even correct. It is the point in the commodity cycle, far more than the brokerage, which will govern whether you feel like a "winner" or a "loser" in the first year after you invest.

As regards E. Janszen, I noticed you posted something to the effect "alright Janszen, I'm going to take the plunge now, so you better be right!".

Please note however Mega, that actually Janszen does not seem at this time a proponent of "doing" or "buying" anything at all! Seems iTulip more than anything is suggesting the virtue of sitting arond doing nothing while watching!

The discomfort one can feel at times is the "cash funds burning a hole in one's pocket" type of distress. There is a fear to lose out big on impending market moves. At least owning some gold right now may be an easy call to see a 20% up move in the next year, but even that is "on the fence" because it depends whether Bernanke has his glasses well polished and is paying attention to when a sharp easing may be required. Maybe he'll miss that call entirely?

So the really good insight is that right now having sold everything and being about to "pull the trigger" on new investment ideas requires you to make peace with the thought that any move you make out of cash may require you to lose 20% of your funds in a first year. Or you could make 40% on the upside just as easily.

Peter's brokerage is fine. More relevant is that all assets have been going up uninterruptedly for four years. Any turbulence in the coming six months can chop any one of those assets down to size with all the speed of a guillotine.

If you don't want to lose an initial 20% in whatever you jump into, do nothing, and wait until everyone is banging on the table about a very clear new trend emerging.

Or else just ask Bart when it's OK to pile into GOLD - that guy really likes to wait for every last bit of risk to leak out of a commodity before he makes a move (drat him!). I understand he and others are now piling money into gold at this time, so maybe that much is a safe bet.

As for commodity stocks, they are a screaming buy right now. The problem with all assets on sale is that every time they are a screaming buy they are also a screaming risk. If you want the sale item, you have to take the risk with it. Right now risk is quite high, and the sale is the absolute biggest bargain basement of the last 3 years.

[Mega]

Re: Euro Pacific ?

Good eveing Luke
Nothing in life is a done deal.......risk is every where.

Nope i don't expect EJ etc to say "JUMP" but i simply wanted to know if anyone had dealings with Peter. I like Peter i listen to his radio show every week, but last week he was kicking off about people jumping ship.

"If only they stayed with me"........"Ok they took a short term loss (back in 2000), but if they stayed with me they be up 4 or 5 TIMES their investement now."

Just wondered if anyone KNEW a way of finding out if that was true or was Peter (worried by Clients panic) was pulling a "Cramer"?
Mike

[Guest]

Re: Euro Pacific ?

Wotcher Miker -

No - Peter Schiff is not pulling a Cramer by any means.

The truth should be acknowledged. If you have 'brass balls' like Peter Schiff, and you bought gold and silver mining stocks like Kamikaze Peter did back in 2000, you'd indeed have made a bundle.

When I say 'brass balls', I think this guy bet his entire net worth on the better mid-caps within the gold bull market back then, but he had a fair idea what he was doing.

Indeed it must be said in tribute to Peter, he did it the serious way - when the market dumps on these positions hacking the legs right off of them, so that his 2 or 3 million dollar holdings were cut in half several times over through the past six or seven years, with each walloping occuring in the space of a nightmarish few weeks, Peter Schiff was takinng a nice easygoing break, did not sell a damn thing, and was probably whistling Fred Astair tunes.

By holding through every last vicious twist of that market he got his PAYOLA, and he's done what very few other investors in the gold bull market did. He did that in the FIRST HALF of the gold bull market - when risk was a lot lower.

Now we approach the second half, and the stakes are higher with a downside lower.

CAUTION: you look at what Peter Schiff did with Gold shares, and you think "easy - all I have to do is buy and hold this basket of leveraged positions to the gold bull" and make a fortune.

But this is a wild, bucking, treacherous bet to make. If you have a strong dislike of the idea of a 50% drawdown of your assets this should suggest to you that this may be a mistake for you to follow. It was a mistake for me, as I'm not of that temperament, or to be more precise I'm not pulling down a 300K per year salary owning a highly successful brokerage.

You can admire a guy with 'brass balls' investing in gold shares. But don't forget it's your money getting mixed up with the notion of courage and self-esteem. If it's your safe money, best A) to stick with bullion, and another idea that's not bad is B) to follow the iTulip signals on KA. They may not be precise, but if they are even approximate, you'll get in at a pretty good buy point. Actually the record going back a half dozen years is a fair bit better than "approximate".

We've got the makings of a good buy point now. I'd say, "split the difference" - Put 33% of your PM funds to work right now. To be super-conservative, wait until June of next summer before putting your next 33% into PM (getting into the soft gold price season). Put the final 33% into PM bullion at the end of next summer, after you're sure there's been no really bad correction down. Don't buy major positions from late September to end of May every year, as you'll pay a lot more during those months. This is the 'safe enough for Granny' way to ease into the bullion investment.

Or if you are really impatient, just dump your buy all in there now (we are just before the buying season) and promptly duck, in case the thing blows up in your face !

That's it! Then put some Bob Marley on the "phonograph" and shrug off the piss-poor prospects for the world!

[Spartacus]

Re: Euro Pacific ?

Good eveing Luke
Nothing in life is a done deal.......risk is every where.

Nope i don't expect EJ etc to say "JUMP" but i simply wanted to know if anyone had dealings with Peter. I like Peter i listen to his radio show every week, but last week he was kicking off about people jumping ship.

"If only they stayed with me"........"Ok they took a short term loss (back in 2000), but if they stayed with me they be up 4 or 5 TIMES their investement now."

Just wondered if anyone KNEW a way of finding out if that was true or was Peter (worried by Clients panic) was pulling a "Cramer"?
Mike

You could check if Hulbert tracks Schiff

Hulbert figures out the actual cost of trades, and actual profits you would have made (from memory, some things may be wrong)

1. the newletter makes a recommendation - say, buy at $5
2. Hulbert finds the first filled order after the recommendation say, somebody managed to buy at $5.50 just after the recommend - ACTUAL TRADES that could have been made are tracked, not what the newsletter "theoretically" could have made, but what it actually made.
3. Hulbert includes trading commissions in their calculations (many newletter writers don't)
4. newsletter says sell
5. Hulbert finds out a realistic sale price - again, a price you could have gotten, not the theoretical price the newsletter will advertise if the trade makes money.
6. Hulbert also calculates beta for the portfolios and tells you the beta (unfortunately they call it "risk", but nothing's perfect I suppose.

There must be other services like Hulbert's but they're apparently the gold (pun intended) standard.

[Mega]

Re: Euro Pacific ?

My Thanks to everyone and the PM's i had on the subject.
Mike