As the United States continues to push towards a military conflict with Russia, there will likely be no real winner when the dust settles. However, if we compare the these two superpowers in the current “gold market”, the Russians are the clear winners.

While the U.S. has been (secretly) liquidating its once massive official gold holdings, the Russians have be doing quite the opposite. According to the data on Smaulgld.com, the Russians have added a hefty 3,000,000 oz of gold to its official reserves since the beginning of the year. If you haven’t checked out Smaulgld’s site, I highly recommend it.

In Smaulgld’s article, Central Bank Of Russia Continues To Boost Overall Reserves, here were the monthly additions to Russia’s official gold holdings:

JAN 2017 = +1,000,000 oz

FEB 2017 = +300,000 oz

MAR ... Read more »

An asymmetric trade is a situation where investing a relatively small amount of money holds the potential of yielding a profit many times the amount of the original sum at risk. In other words, where the risk to reward is skewed massively in the direction of reward.

This took place recently with Bitcoin (BTC). Is this conceptually different from bets made years ago on Microsoft, Cisco, Amazon, or Facebook, which yielded hundreds of percent profit to intrepid investors? Does it have relevance to the possible returns during the next few years for those who hold physical gold and silver?

I would answer "yes" and "yes."

The current "mania" in the cryptocurrency space – most notably BTC and Ethereum (ETH), along with a few other "app coins" – offers an in-future lesson for a similar setup in the precious metals. (For more on the above topic, see " ... Read more »

The big news from the Federal Reserve wasn’t the quarter point rate hike (which was expected). The big news was Fed chair Janet Yellen’s announcement of “balance sheet normalization.”

In plain English, the Fed claims it will begin selling off assets from its balance sheet, which remains bloated from previous Quantitative Easing programs. If “normalization” does actually proceed at full speed, it would entail $50 billion in financial assets per month being dumped into the market.

Not even Fed officials know how markets will react to the fire sale. But it will likely have the effect of a set of stealth rate hikes. That’s assuming Yellen follows through on her “normalization” threat.

Continue reading here.

This spring, gold vastly outperformed silver, leaving the white metal looking for direction. The silver chart shows prices winding up within a huge wedge pattern.

As the trading range gets narrower and narrower, it sets up a resolution in the form of a very strong directional move one way or the other.

A few more weeks of consolidation are still possible before a decisive break out from the pattern.

In 2016, silver was very strong in the first half of the year and weak in the second half. The first half of 2017 has been something of a wash, setting up something potentially big in the back half of the year.

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