Black Jack,
That is the biggest bunch of nonesense. You must be 'pumping gold' for a living.
As a 20 year veteran of high leverage futures trading, and being one of the best at it, if I don't say so myself, I can spot a pin-head hawker a mile away. Shut up and quit misleading people.
There is a fundamental flaw in your assessment. Gold is NOT a currency anymore. It was categorically dumped, and is still being dumped worldwide by national banks, PRECISELY to support paper currencies.
Goldman Sachs, as an example, rarely ever makes a huge mistake in a long term trading position. Not only did they start shorting gold when Booby Rubin was Treasury Sec. under Clinton, they took a huge position shorting gold, then worked with England's bank to short more. Then Australia went short. Even Ruassia is selling gold for Pete's sake. It's been that way for years now- gold is not going to be "rising", it is not a "safe harbor", it is not a "currency" anymore. Get over it.
In the last 6 or so years, more people have lost more money following horribly disingenuos advice like yours, hoping they were being "safe" in gold, and while there have been 2 short covering rallies in gold of no fundamental significance (the rallies were technical in nature and nothing else), people like you continue to advise honest investors to buy the crap gold you don't want, so you can get out in a temporary rally or short covering spurt.
Shame on you.
If you actually want to learn something about gold, study the technical and fundamental relationship between gold and oil. If you have the brains to figure that out, you won't have to make a living trying to convince other people to buy the commodities you want to dump. You'll feel monumentally better about yourself as well.
By the way, the indexes are not "overvalued"- that particular word is a horrible misnomer. "The market", which is actually the S&P 500 (that's what the world operates on- actually the S&P 500 futures is the "real market"), and the market is never "overvalued" or "undervalued"- it is a "settlement" of buyers and sellers at any given time based on the technical assessment of the index's behavior.
So, because you fail to understand that gold is NOT a "buy" anymore and you fail to understand that world currencies operate WITHOUT a gold standard and are based on DERIVATIVES, you'll continue to mislead people, and that is just plain wrong.
May you recieve a full margin call for every investor you lie to.
There's a tried and true tact that I used to take when I traded. When an idiot like yourself tried pumping the price, a few of us wealthier traders would pummel the other side of the trade and run you into your stops to get you out, then we'd cover our shorts, and buy. then, and only then, had the market "absorbed" ding dongs like you and could get on with the real business of moving in the right direction.
"Oh nay is vanity profitable to aye."
....and one other thing... the Euro - I could give a dam what happens to it. I just trade the thing whatever way its going. If it croaks, great, if it lives, I could care less. One thing for certain though, you'd have to be a complete idiot to truly not think that if the Euro collapses- every single Euro dollar won't go right into the strongest and most stable currency in the world- and that, my unknowledgeable friend is and will remain the U.S. Dollar. Nobody buys gold in a currency exit- that'd be absolutely assinine- they buy derivative dollars with a HUGE leverage advantage.
Gawd how stupid can people be to believe such gold nonesense?
Goldman Sachs, as an example, rarely ever makes a huge mistake in a long term trading position.
A former hedge fund staffer says he has detailed Goldman Sachs' involvement in IPO "laddering" schemes to regulators looking into alleged illegal practices in the IPO market during the tech boom, The Post has learned.
Nicholas Maier, a former executive at loud-mouth television commentator Jim Cramer's hedge fund during the go-go late '90s, had a ringside seat to the goings-on. He told The Post he spoke for six hours with investigators from the Securities and Exchange Commission.
He told the SEC that while he was at Cramer & Co., now known as Cramer Berkowitz & Co., Goldman Sachs repeatedly made the allocation of coveted initial public offering shares a condition of his buying additional shares at a price to be determined later by Goldman Sachs.
"The more I promised to buy in the aftermarket, the more shares I could expect to get," Maier said he was told by a Goldman Sachs broker. "If I reneged on my aftermarket order, I could expect to feel the consequences, or be docked on future allocations," Maier alleged.
Maier told lead SEC investigator for the IPO investigations Tammy Stark on April 29 that Goldman kept a "book" on each deal that recorded the price at which Maier should buy more stock.
Maier said that after the three-hour interview, the SEC showed him one of those books, for Marvell Technology Group, which went public in June 2000 in an offering led by Goldman Sachs.
"It has a column for aftermarket orders, and in it was listed an order for the stock from Cramer & Co. for 35 percent above the opening price," Maier said. "This is the smoking gun," Maier said he thought at the time.
Goldman Sachs officials declined comment.
"Jim's firm did not do anything improper with regard to IPOs," said Cramer's lawyer Eric Seiler. Seiler said the SEC has not contacted Cramer.
Soliciting orders to buy additional shares - at an inflated price - after the IPO stock begins trading in the open market is known as "laddering" or "tie-in agreements."
Legal experts say it can be illegal to tie the allocations of shares to additional purchases. The practice, which Maier says was widespread on Wall Street, served to jack up stock prices artificially.
Additional buying gave the impression, to the uninitiated, that demand for that stock was skyrocketing. It fed the appetite for tech stocks and the IPO boom that later went bust, wiping out $4 trillion in market value.
The SEC's probe into illegal laddering practices by Wall Street's elite brokerages is a continuation of the successful investigation into how IPOs were allocated by Credit Suisse First Boston.
In January, CSFB settled charges that the firm extorted high commissions from clients before giving them big chunks of hot IPO stocks. CSFB paid a $100 million fine to the SEC without admitting or denying guilt. But the investigation led to the dismissal of three employees and the resignation of top exec Allen Wheat.
Meanwhile, there are hundreds of lawsuits from angry investors seeking millions in compensation.
Maier's damaging testimony and that of others could bring bigger troubles for Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms at the center of the SEC's laddering probe.
Morgan Stanley, Robertson Stephens and J.P. Morgan Chase are also reportedly subjects of the probe.
Maier wrote a book published in March called "Trading with the Enemy," about his former employer and controversial CNBC on-air personality and co-founder of financial news Web site TheStreet.com - Jim Cramer. A chapter in that book entitled "House of Cards" triggered the SEC to invite Maier to testify, Maier said.
Cramer, no longer affiliated with the hedge fund, has dismissed the allegations in Maier's book.
The above from NY Post...this from Forbes
• How Much Do Futures Brokers Have to Hide?
In early April, a square-jawed reformer named Eliot Spitzer shook with Poseidon-like force at Merrill Lynch's rickety reputation for research and left it in shambles. The New York State attorney general unearthed now-infamous e-mails in which Merrill analysts derided stocks they touted to small investors as "dogs" and "pieces of junk." Within days Merrill switched from outrage to surrender: At its annual meeting in late April, CEO David Komansky abjectly apologized to his clients.
With one thrust, Spitzer is accomplishing what the SEC and the U.S. Attorney's office have failed to do: force radical reform on Wall Street research. "The markets depend on integrity and honesty of information," says Saul Cohen, a lawyer at Proskauer Rose in New York. "The SEC failed to ensure that honesty. Spitzer stepped into the vacuum."
But the Spitzer investigation will do far more than, say, separate analysts' pay from investment banking deals; it could also vastly increase the financial damages Wall Street faces. That has investors worried: Since Spitzer released the damning e-mails on April 8, Merrill Lynch stock has tumbled 23%. The six leading U.S. banks have since shed $48 billion, one-tenth of their market capitalization.
The threats against Wall Street lurk in two corners. First, the settlements with New York and other states over corrupt research will be costly, especially for Merrill. Spitzer is demanding around $100 million in fines. But dozens of other states and their chagrined Merrill clients will likely win lesser amounts. David Trone of Prudential Securities reckons that Merrill will have to pay between $500 million and $1 billion. Spitzer is now examining Salomon Smith Barney, Goldman Sachs, and other firms. If e-mails show that their analysts purposely misled investors, they may face Merrill-sized payments too.
As for your rant on GOLD....8 of the top 10 funds with returns of 60% or better over the past 12 months are all GOLD FUNDS....PLUS Bullion is up 17% since Jan.....at last check Dow and Nasduck still in the red.......
The canadian dollar was up nicely today. I feel the US recovery will be weaker than most are expecting....gold seems to track the US dollar... and with the US trade deficit huge and US budget deficit increasing it could weaken the US dollar further. Gross of PIMCO seems to feel that inflation will double this year to 3%. Not much....but increasing.
Yes ...I know that a lot of institutions have been shorting gold and have huge short positions. A lot of derivatives out there that might have to unwind. That would also help gold.
With a lot of instability in the world due to terrorism and banking problems in Japan more investors might want to have a small position in gold like myself.
Good luck with your trading......you sound a lot smarter than me....thats for sure!