Silver has now dropped to $19 and is down 3.1% for the year. Unfortunately, the pain is probably not over - yet.

If you want to make money long-term, you have to bet against the prevailing consensus of most financial experts. I have never seen such an overwhelming bullish consensus as there is today that the economy is going to do great, that gold is a sell, and that the stock market is going to go higher, and if you want to build speculative wealth, you have to bet against that.

Obtaining a second passport and an offshore bank account are crucial parts of an overall diversification strategy, but they are not the only ones. Capturing international opportunities for your investment portfolio also has an important role and one of the easiest ways to do this is to own foreign currencies. Below are my 10 favorite reasons for doing so.

Are we near the end of one of history's great stock market rallies? I don't think so. Yes, prices are in the upper half of their long-term trends, but it's not what you might call "scary-overvalued." There is still plenty of room on the upside before historical precedents are violated. Let me explain further.

Gold peaked in 2011, bottomed in June and December of 2013, and should rally for several, and probably many, years into the future. Here's why.

Jim Rickards explains in his new book "The Death of Money - The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System" why a US dollar collapse could be coming and why gold would probably emerge at the heart of a new global monetary system as the only money that you can really trust.

A big short term move in both stocks and gold is probably fairly imminent as periods of extremely low volatility like we are currently experiencing are invariably followed by periods of very high volatility that are brought about by a trigger event of some sort. There will probably be an advance warning somewhere, in a corner of the markets that perhaps isn't widely watched...[so] keep a close eye on these 12 inter-market signals.

I am 100% confident that 1) precious metals will bottom this year and resume a new leg to the upside, 2) the extreme emotions right now regarding gold and silver are typical at major turning points and 3) all the underlying fundamental, cyclical and technical conditions for a new bull market in gold and silver are in place. Here's an update on the latest action in gold, silver, platinum and palladium

Before gold can rally, it has to first turn the trend from down to up. We see no evidence of a change in trend. The bearish spacing is repeated, again, as a reminder that it represents a weak market within its down trend. How anyone can posit a bullish scenario from what the charts show flies in the face of known facts, as depicted in the charts.

China has decided to try and walk back from the edge of a Minsky moment and engineer a soft landing. They have made a decision to pop the bubble deliberately, allow defaults to instill market discipline and remove the moral hazard currently in place. They are moving into the modern world as fast as possible based on the enormous tasks they have embraced so we probably can expect no more booms but probably not a bust either. Let me explain.