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I've been watching the price of bags of 90% silver coins for the last few hours. I had been considering a $1000 (face value) bag from Tulving, but they sold out, so I started looking at APMEX. They sold out of $1000 bags about an hour ago. Now they're out of all products in that category, including $500 and $100 bags and $10 rolls.
Yet the price keeps dropping.
I wonder if it's anything to do with those scientists down at the Large Hadron Collider? Perhaps they've managed to bend space-time so we've got last years prices at next years demand?
The big question in my mind is when do the central banks start buying big after bringing prices down?
The following is from Wikipedia on how Nathan Rothschild made a killing in London by tricking the public into thinking the English lost to Napoleon at Waterloo;
To the Rothschilds, [England's] chief financial agents, Waterloo brought a many million pound scoop. ... a Rothschild agent ... jumped into a boat at Ostend ... Nathan Rothschild ... let his eye fly over the lead paragraphs. A moment later he was on his way to London (beating Wellington's envoy by many hours) to tell the government that Napoleon had been crushed: but his news was not believed, because the government had just heard of the English defeat at Quatre Bras. Then he proceeded to the Stock Exchange.
Another man in his position would have sunk his work into consols (securities issued by the UK government), already weak because of Quatre Bra. But this was Nathan Rothschild. He leaned against "his" pillar. He did not invest. He sold. He dumped consols. ...Consols dropped still more. "Rothschild knows," the whisper rippled through the 'Change. "Waterloo is lost." Nathan kept on selling ... consols plummeted—until, a split second before it was too late, Nathan suddenly bought a giant parcel for a song. Moments afterwards the great news broke, to send consols soaring. We cannot guess the number of hopes and savings wiped out by this engineered panic.
If the Fed & CB's are engineering the 'ka', when is the right time to buy...??
Interesting story but you did forget to include the following sentences questioning the claims:
Research by the Rothschild family and others has shown that this legend originated in an anti-semitic French pamphlet in 1846, was embellished by John Reeves in 1887 in The Rothschilds: the Financial Rulers of Nations and then repeated in other later popular accounts, such as that of Morton. Many of the alleged facts stated are incorrect. For example, it has been shown that the size of the market in government bonds at the time would not have enabled a scenario producing a profit of anything near £1 million.
I must admit to being surprised by the over convoluted approach on this site
Gold has formed an unpleasant double top and is now in a confirmed bear market.The technicians have been projecting an initial target of $650 for weeks now.
Why argue with the facts?As camus would observe(to paraphrase),explanations are for the guilty.
Waysouth gets it right. Prepare to see all your PM inflation proofing investments locked up and non-performing for a couple of years. Maybe even longer.
I must admit to being surprised by the over convoluted approach on this site
Gold has formed an unpleasant double top and is now in a confirmed bear market.The technicians have been projecting an initial target of $650 for weeks now.
Why argue with the facts?As camus would observe(to paraphrase),explanations are for the guilty.
iTulip is about asking "Why" and "What shall be" not "What is." Clearly gold is in an bear markets. So are many commodities.
The question is: Why are they in a bear market? Our theory in March was that funds were going to dump them.
And why is physical UNAVAILABLE but prices are dropping.
1+1 = 69, that's a new one for me.
Couldn't that just be logistics? As an example, let's say APMEX has huge numbers of both buyers and sellers today. More sellers than buyers, so prices drop, but the number of buyers still overwhelms their inventory, and they can't resell the new stuff coming in until they've inventoried it.
Not saying that's what's going on, but could it explain the seeming paradox?
Couldn't that just be logistics? As an example, let's say APMEX has huge numbers of both buyers and sellers today. More sellers than buyers, so prices drop, but the number of buyers still overwhelms their inventory, and they can't resell the new stuff coming in until they've inventoried it.
Not saying that's what's going on, but could it explain the seeming paradox?
I think if you add logistics to the fact that entirely different groups of investors drive "paper" versus physical PM demand, you have a pretty good explanation. The way I see it, the PM universe is divided into two different groups. There is a small group of individual investors who fear a systemic collapse who are interested in physical PM (lets call them Gold Bugs), and there is a much larger group (in dollar terms) that includes both funds and the odd punter who have no such systemic fears and are chiefly in the business of chasing the flavor of the month (lets call them Traders). I haven't done anything like a proper survey, but it seems to me that the most widespread viewpoint is that there's danger of a "Japan-like deflation" (and don't start with the definitions and history and so forth -- I'm relating what I think other people are thinking), which is why the majority of Traders are piling out of PM; they happen to mostly own paper gold, so paper gold drops. Simultaneously, the Gold Bugs see the drama in the financial world and conclude that The End is Nigh, and they increase their purchases of physical gold. The discrepancy has to do with the logistic issue of how practical it is to rapidly turn paper gold into physical gold, and the fact that the physical gold market is smaller than the paper market. Alternatively, you might say that iTulip is thinking two steps ahead (poom) whereas the Traders are reacting to ka.
(By the way, this argument includes a lot of assumptions on my part -- for instance about the relative sizes of the paper and physical gold markets. The reader is cautioned that I am speculating from a basis of very little knowledge; perhaps more knowledgeable members of the community will correct factual errors.)
Looking at price movements of Gold in the 1970s there were some wrenching pullbacks. Should it be surprising that we would get pullbacks like the one we are experiencing right now given the number of leverage accounts out there trying to ride every trend.
Looking at price movements of Gold in the 1970s there were some wrenching pullbacks. Should it be surprising that we would get pullbacks like the one we are experiencing right now given the number of leverage accounts out there trying to ride every trend.
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Notice in 1973 Gold prices pulled back from 125 to 90 after a nice run up.
Hi Joy,
Welcome to iTulip.
I assume you're comments were directed towards my post and the immediate discussion before it, since that's where you posted, so I'll answer based on that.
The pullbacks themselves, and their degree, may or may not have been a surprise. EJ a few months ago predicted it, but it seems is surprised to see the gold price drop below $780. Lukester, on the other hand, has been saying for a month or two that based on other things he had read he expected a significant pullback in the price of gold well beyond $780.
My post and jtabeb's before it, however, weren't directed towards the price drop itself, but to the odd event that prices are dropping but dealers seem to be running out of inventory. Why are prices dropping if there is so much buying going on that dealers run out of stock?
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