While not widely reported or analyzed, over the past several months there has been an enormous amount of buying in the various markets for physical silver - both one-ounce sovereign-minted coins and refined bars. Along with some standard trading signals I'll discuss below, I believe the activity in the market for physical silver is signaling the potential for a large upside move sometime this year. Let me explain.

The health of a market is best assessed along three vectors: fundamentals, technicals (price action) and sentiment and this is what each is saying about the health of the markets these days.

Lifted by a continued surge in Asian gold sales, consumer demand for gold reached an all-time high in 2013 at 3,893 tonnes. Amazingly, 54% of this demand came from two places: India and China. However, it is only recently that the East has dominated global demand for the yellow metal. In this infographic, we look at India and China specifically to see why demand keeps expanding in the East.

Every now and then very informative, insightful and well-written financial articles gets buried by more trendy, exciting and provocative articles and, as such, they get overlooked - fly under the radar as Malaysia flight MH370 has done. Below are introductory paragraphs and links to a few such articles posted on the internet in the past week that are still very timely and well worth your time to check out.

For today's seriously overextended and overvalued US stock markets the best-case scenario is a full-blown correction approaching 20% emerging soon while the worst case is a new cyclical bear market that ultimately leads to catastrophic 50% losses.

Most in the United States have no idea of what is to come. They think they have no choice but to follow the herd over the cliff to certain financial death but some will be prompted to make a different choice. Let me explain.

Market Vectors Gold Miners ETF (GDX) is slowly becoming the de facto standard for measuring gold stock performance. Nearing its eighth birthday, GDX has even usurped the venerable HUI gold stock index as this sector's metric of choice in many circles. Let me explain why that is the case.

In the not-too-distant future, sociopolitical and economic conditions in the U.S. will be changing dramatically, affecting tens of millions of Americans and to that end the U.S. government has enacted new legislation that allows it to transform itself into a full-on police state.

I believe gold prices will fall hard between now and the U.S. election in November 2016 - to as low as $400 per troy ounce. Below are 11 sound reasons [really??] why.

The internet is scanned daily to find the most unique, informative, timely and best written articles on the pros and cons of buying physical gold & silver and/or their mining ETFs and how to go about undertaking such action should you decide to do so. Below are this week's 10 best. Enjoy!