Here are 15 reasons why gold prices are undervalued and why big gains could be ahead.

Investors may not like it, but they do own more stocks. The average investor equity allocation is now back to where it was around the 2007 market peak. This has some people worried that things are getting frothy once again. Maybe they are, but there are some legitimate reasons for the increase in equity allocations by households. Here are 7 of them:

Market volatility at the beginning of 2016 spurred many investors to seek a safe place to ride out the storm. As is often the case, the stocks they favored lagged in the recovery, and may be less safe than investors think. Let me explain.

Do your own research, but based on these charts, 2016 looks like a good time to accumulate more gold for the long term.

Love it or hate it, cash is playing an increasingly less important role in society. In some ways this is great news for consumers. The rise of mobile and electronic payments means faster, convenient, and more efficient purchases in most instances...However, there is also a darker side in the shift to a cashless society. Governments and central banks have a different rationale behind the elimination of cash transactions, and as a result, the so-called “war on cash” is on.

Gold & gold mining stocks have been some of the best performers this year. What’s behind that rally and can it continue?

I have long been a critic of government inflation statistics. Not so much with regard to the methodology they use, but because the measure of “average” inflation across the broad economy doesn’t really describe the inflation that the majority of Americans experience. I’ve written about that at length in several letters and now my good friend Ron Arnott, along with his associate Lillian Wu, presents us with a research paper that lays out what inflation actually looks like for most Americans – and the picture is not pretty.

Deutsche Bank’s catastrophic derivative exposure has hammered down its stock price from $135 in 2007 to only $17/share today - ergo a heart-stopping price loss of -87%. Furthermore, DB’s stock price appears to be hell bent for leather to follow Lehman Brothers’ lethal path to Wall Street’s graveyard due primarily to its oppressive derivative’s exposure. As Warren Buffett has said: “Derivatives are weapons of mass destruction.”

To most people, a depression means '30s-style conditions, and since they don't see that, they can't imagine a depression. That's because they know what the last depression was like, but they don't know what one is. It's hard to visualize something you don't understand...Nobody can predict with absolute certainty what this depression will be like...[but one] can be fairly well-assured it won't be an instant replay of the last one...To define the likely differences between this depres­sion and the last one, it's helpful to compare the situa­tion today to that in the early 1930s. The results aren't very reassuring.

As the dollar strengthens gold weakens & as the dollar falls, gold rises - .and it is my firm belief that the dollar is toast. If the dollar falls to the same magnitude which it has in previous interest rate cycles, we could see gold rally by 50%.