Investing

The damage has already been done. Junior mining companies have already dropped 80%. Rather than wallow in the injustice of the apparent gold market manipulation, I believe it is better to apply the wisdom, "if you can't beat them, join them."

Although not perfect (nothing is), gold has a tendency to go up in the face of external shocks...[and] tends to have a low and sometimes negative correlation to US equities. As such, with stocks up, gold being down is not a terrible outcome for the investor using gold as a diversifier. Let me explain further below.

Are stocks in a bubble? While leverage has returned to the stock market driving up stock prices and aggregate demand in the process, margin debt is still shy of its all-time high as a percentage of GDP, so there is certainly some headroom for further rises. A look at the following 5 charts illustrate that contention quite clearly.

The warrant investor needs to be aware that owning the stock outright is the conservative approach. When using the warrant, the basic common stock MUST appreciate to a certain level BEFORE the warrant’s risk/reward basis becomes better than an outright stock purchase...

Unsustainable trends can survive much longer than most people anticipate, but they do end when their “time is up” – at the culmination of their time cycles...In an effort to bring clarity in how and when these trends could change direction we analyzed more than 20 different cycles. They almost unanimously point to tectonic shifts in the months and years ahead … starting now. We have been warned. At this point, we have enough confirmation to accept that the gold and silver crash – starting in April of 2013 – was the first shot across the board of what is to come. Read on!

Copper is one of the most important and popular industrial metals in the world. With 3% per year production growth since 1900, approximately 16 million tons of the metal was produced in 2011, according to the International Copper Study Group. Below, we outline some of the largest and most important copper-producing nations across the world:

What do 1929, 2000 and 2007 all have in common? Those were all years in which we saw a dramatic spike in margin debt. In all three instances, investors became highly leveraged in order to "take advantage" of a soaring stock market but, of course, we all know what happened each time. The spike in margin debt was rapidly followed by a horrifying stock market crash. Well guess what? It is happening again.

The most dangerous, wealth-destroying investment in the world is leveraged exchange-traded funds (ETFs). On the surface, these ETFs promise to double or triple the movements of the underlying markets they track...but they'll do anything but. You see, double- and triple-leveraged ETFs (whether long or short) pack a nasty surprise. It's almost unbelievable, actually, and particularly in this volatile market, theses ETFs are hardwired for losses. Here's what I mean.

Over the past 6 years, when the yield on high yield bonds (junk bonds) broke above resistance of bullish falling wedges, the S&P 500 ended up declining between 17% & 50%. Will it be different this time?

As investors we crave a specific plan of attack for every conceivable market scenario so here are five alternative courses of action (other than cash) to consider in the current market. (Yes, it’s possible to put the market volatility to work for us.) So writes Louis Basenese (www.wallstreetdaily.com) in edited excerpts from his original article* entitled The Five Smartest Responses to the Stock Market …