Posts Tagged ‘gold’

More on Early Sept Gold

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

Despite my mis-spelling of the word “too” in the previous post, I received a great number of queries about my thoughts on the direction of gold.  I think that there will be a seasonal rise in actual gold though the way that the markets have reacted to the Barrick unwind of their hedge book.  I guess we all will see over the next few weeks, right?

For full disclosure I own some shares of KGC and have some covered calls on it.  I am in the money for the calls and wish that I wasn’t and I didn’t have the calls so I could have made more money.

Besides India’s holiday season where it is traditional to give gold as a gift, with the dollar at a very deep low, people are turning towards precious metals.  I am talking about the actual metals and I am not sure that the mining stocks and the mining business, Barrick included, will do okay for the month of Sept.  I noticed that Kinross a year ago dropped a lot from the beginning of Sept through the month but there is the question then that past performance doesn’t predict future results.

Silver may do well but all the precious metals are looking like they are getting over bought.  People are taking profit and perhaps moving to different parts of the sector.  I don’t know and honestly, neither do they.  They are making plays on what they think the future might be.  I would agree that things might be very bleak if we don’t get more people working in this country.

The other important thing is that people can’t eat precious metals and like cash, they are only valuable if somebody wants to trade for them or give you something that you really need in exchange for them (the them being gold, silver, etc).

I am open to suggestions.  Anybody else want to add their thoughts on how gold (or any previous metal)  is going to do over the next few weeks?  Please support your data and observations if you decide to share with my readers.

Have a great day, gang!

Sep 10 2009

Also, please  don’t quite go anywhere yet.  Having some tax issues or tax questions?  Any problems with trying to make it through the financial Depression we are in that is making you depressed?  Please read on.

I am expanding  my practice and taking on new tax clients.  If you are interested in having somebody who is a successful businessman and tax professional with integrity review your returns discretely and see if your tax guy or gal is doing a good or goofy job, please drop me an email or post a comment with your contact information and time.

I have experience in international business, small businesses, partnerships, multi-state tax returns (they can get complicated) and anything else you can probably think of.

I also do business consulting and have ran several businesses (still running a few) myself so you are in good hands.  Did I also mention that I have authored over a dozen books that are still in print?  I invite you to please check them out.

If you are looking for a day job, part time work, suggestions for saving money or investing, please check out my book, Practical Money Making, that is listed right after his paragraph in this very post. There are some great suggestions and ways to survive the Depression we are in.

Practical Money Making-Surviving Recession, Layoffs, Credit Problems, Generating Passive Income Streams, Working Full Time or Part Time and Retirement

Interested in any of my books? You may want to make a stop over here. Please click through to purchase my books and some other interesting items that actually ARE on sale.

Have you read my book, “Bad Tax Idea, Good Tax Idea“? Please order it today. The tips inside can save you hundreds if not thousands of dollars! Tax planning should be done year round and not just two weeks into January or later.

Part of all the proceeds from the sales of that book go to Rett Syndrome research. One girl is born with Rett Syndrome worldwide every fifteen minutes. My daughter Arianna has Rett.  Thanks for your support.

Kim Isaac Greenblatt

More on Early Sept Gold

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Too Late For Gold

Saturday, November 8th, 2008

Question from a reader: “I think I am too late to cash in on gold.  What do you think?”

I think that if you are looking for a short term quick turn around of money, you are right, this isn’t the sort of time for gold to have any drastic changes.  There is a retrenching and revisiting to paper currency and for the short term, barring any dramatic news events that might cause spikes-but you can’t factor that in comfortably as a profitable indicator-if anything, gold may be flat for a bit.

For the long haul, that is a different story.  Eventually we will come out of the deflationary situation we are in.  As a commodity, gold is scarce and even now it is tough to find people who will sell you the actual gold you can take possession of without some kind of cash premium on it.  The next question is when will we come out of it and go back to inflation.  I have no idea and despite what fnancial analysts may blog or quip – they don’t have a clue either.

There are gold bugs (people who are great believers in the power of gold as a currency and who lament the loss of gold backing currency-something I somewhat share at times) who feel that now more than ever you should be loading up on actual gold. 

Honestly, at this point, if you are looking to put a small portion of your portfolio, I am not inclined to put anything in gold mines.  I would look for actual gold or funds where you can actually know if there is gold there (for full disclosure-I own some shares of CEF).  If you opt to take ownership of actual gold, make sure whoever you are buying from you can trust.  I would research the heck out of them and try talking to actual people who have bought and taken delivery of the gold.  The next step is to find somewhere safe to store the gold.  Doghouses, treehouses and under the bed generally shouldn’t be your first choice.

I am not a financial advisor and I don’t even play one on television.  Due your own due diligence and remember that when you see the peaks and valleys of commodities like gold or oil, remember that people are reacting on what they think the future might bring.  Your tolerance for risk and how much money you have behind you should be factored in. 

For the immediate future, I will go on record restating that cash is king for the time being.  If any business opportunities present themselves, if you have cash, you can jump in.  A lot of profitable events have happened because people had the cash at the right place at the right time.  Remember that during economic downturns there are a lot of bargains and opportunities.

Also, in case you are interested, here is a $100,000 gold note that use to be used for transactions between banks.

If anybody has any of these lying around that they want to send me, I will be happy to take them off their hands.  For the good of the economy, of course.

Always open to questions and thanks for asking!

Practical Money Making-Surviving Recession, Layoffs, Credit Problems, Generating Passive Income Streams, Working Full Time or Part Time and Retirement

Kim Isaac Greenblatt

As of the writing of this article,  I owned shares in CEF.

 

Too Late For Gold?  Kim Isaac Greenblatt says it depends.

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Exhaustion of Resources

Saturday, October 25th, 2008

Question from a reader:”I’ve heard about exhaustion of resources, what is that about?”

My answer is:

What do you do when you run out of oil, money, gold, wood or any resources in a business?  You look for other sources of resources or substitutes.   You hope that you can get the resources at a reasonable price or else you have to raise your prices or seriously think if you want to stay in business.  If you take a look at any types of small businesses, they mirror governments and big businesses.

Let us say for example that you make wooden tables.  You set up in a lush forest a house and you start making wooden tables.  They get to be pretty popular and everybody from the village starts to buy your tables.  Other craftsmen see that you are making money with your tables and set up houses near you.  Pretty soon, business is great and there are more craftsmen near you and you end up using all the wood from the forest.  No problem, you start getting wood carted in from a nearby forest.  The problem is that it starts to cost a little more so you start to raise your prices just a bit.

A craftsman in another town sells tables cheaper than you because he hasn’t exhausted his forest yet.  People start to go there.  What can you do to compete?  You need to find a cheaper source of wood to make your tables with.  So you start working deals with other places to get cheap wood in exchange for some free tables.  You can lower your prices a bit.

Now, let us add another layer.  Let us add a marketplace that actually places values on your wood and causes the value to go up and down.  You may go this marketplace and buy promises or futures that the price for wood will be fixed at a certain point to guarantee that you will have wood to make your tables with.

Now, suppose that there are other buyers and sellers who sell imaginary shares of bundled futures of wood and they ultimately have to make due at one point or another and buy the wood they are claiming they own or sell wood that they own.

Let us now assume that everybody has enough wooden tables.  People don’t need as many anymore.  Your inventory of wood starts to grow and you have to drop prices to start moving tables.  Your competitors do the same and some of them go out of business because they can’t pay their bills. 

The preceding example was an oversimplified one but that pretty much sums up the marketplace for resources.  Prices, unless managed by market makers, tend to adjust based on supply and demand for goods and services.  Once a resource is exhausted, some sort of cost has to be expended to start getting fresh resources, or to research new ways of making tables (maybe stone or plastic instead of wood).

Kim Isaac Greenblatt

The profitable blog talks about exhaustion of resources.

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AIG Bailout and the US Owning the World – Literally “Owned”

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008

As I watch the news and speculation as to what will happen with AIG over the next few days, one interesting scenario that surfaced in the news was that the US Treasury might give 40-80 Billion Dollars to AIG for controlling 79.9% of the company. Without going into how bad the debt situation is, that would be an interesting way for the US to actually and quite literally “own” the world. Think about it.

It may not be profitable at first but we would be owning all the insurance and investments in a lot of countries all over the world including India. AIG is (or maybe should we say was?) a powerful multi-national insurance company. The joke use to be that AIG knew what it was doing because it could sell life insurance in India to people who believed in reincarnation.

I am thinking that a lot of people are wondering if AIG can get reincarnated and honestly, without seeing how deep the rabbit hole is in terms of their debts, maybe it isn’t a good idea for the US to bail out the company. Still, that would make for some pretty exotic income streams and sadly, we could always print more money to cover our problems – something I am not fond of because we are already in a stagflation state and we are probably just a few years away from crazy inflation (I hope I am wrong about that but that is the way things seem to be going unless we continue with a globalized deflation).

Russia suspended trading in their markets – there was a drop of 20% My thinking is that the Russian and international companies that have money started pulling it out because of the domino effect of AIG among other financial meltdowns. Interesting to note that there will probably be dumping of a lot of commodities and the price at least for the short term will go down.

We all know that in the long run, anything that is scarce and of value (like oil, gold, silver) will go eventually go back up.

How does this affect the US and AIG? Well, if we are collecting internationally everbody’s insurance payments and certain investment vehicles, one would hope that it would give us political clout in the countries we are doing business in. Maybe we can leverage that into better trade agreements, better diplomatic agreements and we can alleviate some of the international hostilities that are going on. Maybe we can get payment in some of these lower priced commodities like oil, gold, silver and yes, even fresh water!

Nothing says love and come and be my friend as covering their insurance policies in times of need and of course, getting favorable trading agreements!

Be well, save money and if nothing else, it is fascinating to watch what is unfolding in our lifetime!

My latest book, Practical Money Making, will help you save money in the trying times ahead! Check it out!

Kim Greenblatt

Kim Greenblatt asks in his blog, profitable, if the US ends up owning AIG, would we own the world?

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Posted in Business | 5 Comments »

Things You Should Consider When Starting A Business V-Competition

Saturday, July 19th, 2008

Let’s say that you have all the other elements for your imaginary hot dog cart business planned out.  The next thing you need to take into account that should be incorporated into your business plan as well is your competition.

What are you up against in your anticipated marketplace?  If you are selling hot dogs outside the city courthouse are there already three other hot dog vendors out there?  Are all of them swamped at lunch and it looks like that if they had a dozen hot dog carts that they all would still be swamped?

Just because there is a lot of competition that doesn’t mean that you should run away.  On the contrary, that could mean that there is a huge demand for the product or service that you are trying to sell.  You need to recognize though if the competition is seasonal or timely.

People won’t eat dogs (usually) at 7 am in the morning if they are going to work at the courthouse.  They might eat though between 11 am and 2 pm throughout the day.  Maybe between 4-6 pm you might get another bump in business. 

In the toy business, your seasonal sales in the United States are usually from October through December.  In India, you can sell gold for weddings generally before monsoon season.

Are you also different enough from the competition to draw business to you from your competitors?  Maybe you sell Kosher hot dogs.  Maybe you have a cute girl in a bikini serving the hot dogs.  What is your edge that will differentiate you or your product from your competition?

By recognizing your competition and incorporating it in your business plan, you show potential investors that you know what you are doing or at least have researched your market enough so that they can see that you are taking yourself seriously and will be treating your job as a business!

Questions?  Comments?  Thanks for reading!

Kim Greenblatt

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