NEM - Lift Off: The Golden Bull Returns | Benzinga
Source: Michael Ballanger 03/11/2024
Michael Ballanger of GGM Advisory Inc. takes a look at current trends in the gold and uranium market, and shares a couple stocks in his portfolio.
For most of 2023, and in fact, since January 2020, when I first launched the GGMA Advisory service, I have been exalting the wonders of gold ownership for a myriad of reasons that date back to the 2008 GFC. Without reciting those reasons, you all know them. Whether they be geopolitical strife, profligate government spending, or banking shenanigans, if I lined them all up in 2005 and asked you to put a dollar value for gold, you would give me a number north of $5,000 per ounce. Yet, despite the vilest of debasement campaigns in the history of modern civilization, the U.S. dollar defied all logic and analysis and steadfastly refused to break out through the ceiling established back in 2011 after the U.S. government gave a blank cheque to the international banking cartel and flooded the world with greenbacks.
This week marks a watershed for me in many respects.
Gold
It validates what I have been writing about for most of my career: that gold is money and that everything else is indeed debt. Gold is the money of kings, and debt is the money of slaves. If one follows that mantra, then cash, stocks, bonds, crypto, and virtually every other form of financial asset is merely a proxy for debt and completely vulnerable to counter-party risk. For those like-minded souls who have striven all their lives for freedom from the shackles of societal pressure and government oppression, the only clear path to financial freedom has always been through the ownership of gold.
I wrote several months ago, as gold wallowed in the maddening, bullion bank-orchestrated trading range between $1,800 and $2,000, that 2024 would be the year that gold finally broke free. I urged overweight positions not in crypto or lithium or uranium or any of the "flaveur du jour" narratives that would be advanced by the legions of podcasting and you-tubing "influencers" where "talking up one's book" (pumping stock positions one holds) has become an art form rather than the frowned-upon dalliances of the celebrity fund managers. I suggested for most of the last six months that we were approaching escape velocity for gold bullion while praying for (rather than predicting) that the gold miners would finally get the memo.
As thousands of PDAC attendees departed the hallowed halls of the Toronto Metro Convention Centre last Wednesday, leaving a trail of broken dreams and discarded presentation brochures on the littered floors, it was the uranium crowd that came away most disheartened because when the bookings were confirmed back in Q3 2023, it appeared that uranium was going to be the favored son of the convention. Prices had rocketed from $50/lb. during last year's PDAC to a high of $105/lb. in the weeks leading up to the conference and judging from the number of uranium penny stocks exhibiting at the convention, they most certainly expected an amplified celebration of capitalism by the time the doors closed.
However, the main theme began with copper taking the limelight in the first few sessions, but by Wednesday, it was the mind-numbing explosion in gold prices that captured the fancies of the investor crowd. While I stuck to my insistence to not attend PDAC (since 2016), colleagues attending were making the tongue-in-cheek remark that "I guess there will be a ton of name changes from "lithium" to "gold" coming up!" I might add that the wannabes that pivoted from lithium to uranium in 2023 are now going to be pivoting once again back to gold, where they began as a listed shell five years ago. Such is life in the world of the junior resource sector.
I have been telling my subscribers to ignore all of the sensationalist grandstanding from all of the usual rockstar gurus that have been called for "$100 silver!" and "$300 yellowcake!" while keeping all eyes focused on the one instrument that is widely followed by the algobots that dominates the global financial markets these days which is the SPDR Gold Shares ETF (GLD:US) that actually tracks not the gold shares but rather the bullion price in what was originally supposed to be a 10:1 ratio. The non-human bid-hunters that roam the cyber world of stock trading with mountain ...