One of the prevailing theories as to why anyone would want to manipulate the gold market, besides the obvious reason of profiting from the manipulation, is that "they" want to keep gold and silver prices down to hide inflation and the fact that the dollar is weakening.  But my thinking is,...

I have a google docs spreadsheet on my Android phone that has all my stock and bond info.  I have to manually update the price of the Treasuries each morning, and then I can check my portfolio anytime during the day from my phone.  My spreadsheet shows daily return and return from the beginning, alo...

My understanding is that money velocity is just the ratio of the GDP to the money supply.  For example, if the GDP of an imaginary country is $150, and the money supply is $100, then the money velocity is 150/100 = 1.5.  So, any time a country prints an enormous amount of money, like the US did duri...

If anyone is not familiar with this, there was an article in Time Magazine about it in 2013, which I highly recommend: http://business.time.com/2013/03/12/if-theres-no-inflation-why-are-prices-up-so-much/ That article seems misleading to me. Gold rising in price is no more inflation than stocks or ...

Has the PP ever performed worse than 2.98% CAGR over any 3 year period (not calendar years, but any 3 year period)? Sure. Remember that the three-year period you gave is still positive in real terms. Assuming that we are only interested in real terms, it was worse 1999-2001 and 2000-2002. Also 1981...

According to http://www.peaktotrough.com/hbpp.cgi if you go back 3 years, 6/8/2012 through today, 6/8/2015, the performance is as follows: Years 3.00 CAGR 2.98% Starting Capital 10,000 Ending Capital 10,922 Total Return 9.22% Max Drawdown 7.81% (2012-10-02 - 2013-06-27) DD > 10% Count 0 Annualized S...

I follow this blog linked below and there was a great write up of the events taking place, even though his view's differ from a lot of us here, but his views seem to be actually facts. A lot us think that we don't want the "takeover" since it can increase taxes and only benefits Polar.   ...

I bought GTU over PHYS, in the first place, because PHYS has the extra taxes.  Polar called me and tried to tell me that the taxes would be very small if physical redemption is added to GTU. But after doing some digging, it appears that adding physical redemption will increase the cost of ownership ...

Most people don't use their VP to protect against SHTF.  This approach definitely belongs in your VP. This is for my VP, but I still wanted to be protected if the SHTF, so I figured the 3x gold would save the day. My thinking is, if I trust the PP enough to go up over time that I am putting my life...

Another good one...this one gets into the mechanics a little better. I don't think I would invest in an ETF that did swaps for obscure stuff, but I'm not particularly concerned with swaps on US LTTs, the S&P500 or gold. http://www.horizonsetfs.com/Pdf/Education/Swap_Based_ETFs.pdf More 3x ETF p...

Another good one...this one gets into the mechanics a little better. I don't think I would invest in an ETF that did swaps for obscure stuff, but I'm not particularly concerned with swaps on US LTTs, the S&P500 or gold. http://www.horizonsetfs.com/Pdf/Education/Swap_Based_ETFs.pdf More 3x ETF p...

:o I've provided you everything you need to focus your study in order to make an educated decision on whether this is right for you or not. If the main pointers were not clear, let me recap the areas for additional study. - Path dependency...what is it? What are the implications? - The exponential ...

If the US government defaults on it's debt, wouldn't that make the dollar worthless? I'd assume if the entity that can print it's own money defaults, corporate bonds would fair much worse. Besides, if the US government defaults, dollar goes down (hyperinflation), wouldn't gold (priced in dollars) s...

I'm quite aware of what you were discussing, but respectfully, I submit you are not thinking this one through. I hope you will do so a little bit more. I would also suggest you Google up stock lending fees. I'm trying very hard to think this through, but I'm very confused about the decay issue.  De...

I'm quite aware of what you were discussing, but respectfully, I submit you are not thinking this one through. I hope you will do so a little bit more. I would also suggest you Google up stock lending fees. I'm trying very hard to think this through, but I'm very confused about the decay issue.  De...

I've mentioned this several times but I will reiterate. Make sure you understand the math of leveraged ETFs and imagine one of the assets you are short has several years of a very good run. But if it isn't clear lets do this example. Imagine an asset moves a factor of two. If it goes against you an...

I've been doing more research on these leveraged ETFs, and I see articles online saying that you are better off shorting the inverse ETF than buying the long ETF.  So, one would short TTT, SPXU and DGLD.  Here is one of those articles: http://seekingalpha.com/article/2444425-benefits-of-short-sellin...

If they are tax inefficient, then I would do it in my IRA. If they are tax efficient, then I would do it outside my IRA. So, I can't figure out how to proceed until I know more about the taxes involved. If all goes well, likely you will be rebalancing enough that tax efficiency isn't going to be wh...

My plan was to only put 2% of my overall portfolio into the 3x PP, so I am not overly worried about the risks.  I happen to have 2% of my net worth in my IRA, so I was thinking about making my entire IRA a 3x PP, depending on the tax treatment of these ETFs.  I looked over the prospectuses of these...

My plan was to only put 2% of my overall portfolio into the 3x PP, so I am not overly worried about the risks.  I happen to have 2% of my net worth in my IRA, so I was thinking about making my entire IRA a 3x PP, depending on the tax treatment of these ETFs.  I looked over the prospectuses of these ...

I am about to pull the trigger in a 3x PP for my VP (UGLD, UPRO, and TMF).  How tax efficient are these 3x ETFs?  Morningstar apparently has tax data on ETFs, but I'm not sure I understand everything.  For example, for TMF, it says "Potential Cap Gains Exposure" 18.89.  What does that mean...

The short answer is that the "spot price" is set in the futures market.  Basically you take the "future" price for gold and discount it by the "risk free" rate (which happens to be near zero at the moment) to come up with today's price.  Since gold is traded around the...

I am confused about how the price of gold is determined.  On the one hand, gold is priced twice a day by the "London Gold Fix", as described here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_fixing But gold is also traded on exchanges as physical gold and futures, and the price changes constantly th...

How does re-balancing work?  Also, this would be much more inefficient from a tax perspective, given that the interest on Treasuries is taxed as ordinary income.

You may want to look at results since ~1976, since the PP wasn't available to investors until Gold was legalized in 1975.  The return data from the early 70's has a significant effect on backtesting, but gold wasn't tradable in those years so I think its most realistic to exclude those early years ...