Saturday, August 24, 2024

The Consequences of AI / Politics / AI

By: Nadeem_Walayat

What happens to humans when they are no longer able to control their own destiny i.e. become less than wage slaves? For that we look to what the Welfare States have supposedly achieved. Does giving benefits to people help or hinder people? In Britain we have a benefits culture that extends to some 9 million people of working age who for a multitude of reasons do not work. So what happens to those within this sub culture?

Are they seeking ways to better themselves or do the devolve deeper into self pity expecting someone else to do things for them, do those who live on benefits look after the property they live in? Their neighbourhoods? We'll go ask any landlord why they won't rent their properties to those on benefits because they will be a nightmare of unreliability.

Saturday, August 24, 2024

Can Greedy Politicians Really Stop Price Inflation With a "Price Gouging" Ban? / Politics / Inflation

By: MoneyMetals

Kamala Harris is going to fix price inflation.

As she explains it, greedy corporations are arbitrarily raising prices and causing inflation. She will stop this “price gouging” and inflation will go away.

The problem with this plan is greedy corporations don’t cause price inflation. Greedy politicians do.

Friday, August 23, 2024

Why Alien Intelligence Cannot Predict the Future / Companies / AI

By: Nadeem_Walayat

Humanity is now creating systems that we DO NOT UNDERSTAND how they actually work! AI is unlike anything man has developed to date, deep neural nets. Anyone who says that they understand what deep neural networks such as the LLM' with their billions and now trillion parameter neural nets are doing is lying. A deep neural net is a lot like looking at a stock price chart where we have the neural net that is on the left and we have the prediction that is outputted on the blank side of the stock chart.

Friday, August 23, 2024

Stock Market Surefire Way to Go Broke / Stock-Markets / Investing 2024

By: Stephen_McBride

Summary:

• After a strong start to the year, markets have cooled off and the Fear & Greed Index is signaling “extreme fear.” Despite this, stocks have rallied and remain up 14% for the year.

• Investors are hardwired to be pessimistic, but optimists are generally the ones who make more money.

• Despite many crashes, the odds of making money in US stocks is 88% over any five-year period in history. That’s why optimists have a higher chance of making money over the long term.

Friday, August 23, 2024

RIP Google Search / Companies / Google

By: Stephen_McBride

Summary:

• A federal judge ruled Google (GOOG) illegally maintained its search dominance by paying Apple (AAPL) $20 billion annually to be the default search engine on iPhones. This could impact Apple’s profits and signal a decline in Google’s search dominance.

• The growing US national debt could lead to the devaluation of the dollar, resulting in higher stock prices.

• While most investors are cut off from the private markets, the Destiny Tech100 (DXYZ) is a fund that allows anyone to own a slice of companies like SpaceX and OpenAI.

Friday, August 23, 2024

What happened to the Fed’s Gold? / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2024

By: Richard_Mills

As the richest nation and the world’s largest economy, it is hardly a surprise that the United States holds the most gold.

What is surprising is where the gold isn’t: the United States Federal Reserve, known colloquially as the central bank.

Mainstream media dutifully reports that the American central bank is number one out of the top 10 gold depositories in the world. Its 8,133 metric tons are worth a staggering $630 billion at USD$2,2200/oz.

Friday, August 23, 2024

US Dollar Reserves Have Dropped By 14 Percent Since 2002 / Currencies / US Dollar

By: MoneyMetals

Dollar dominance is slowly ebbing as the world looks to diversify away from the greenback.

The share of dollars making up global reserves has dropped by 14 percent since the turn of the century, according to data compiled by the Atlantic Council.

As of 2002, dollars accounted for 72 percent of global reserves. Today, dollars make up about 58 percent of reserves.

This doesn’t mean the dollar is about to collapse, but it does reveal a slow drift away from dollar dominance as other countries seek to minimize their dependence on the greenback and cut the monetary strings the United States often pulls on to advance its foreign policy goals.

Friday, August 23, 2024

Will Electric Vehicles Be the Killer App for Silver? / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2024

By: MoneyMetals

Industrial demand for silver has been surging in recent years. Solar panel manufacturers were largely behind the 11% jump in demand for 2023 versus the prior year. Forecasters predict another 9% jump this year.

For silver investors, however, the future of demand from manufacturers may be even brighter than the recent past.

The solar industry has been behind much of the growing appetite for silver.

Friday, August 23, 2024

EUR/USD Update: Strong Uptrend and Key Levels to Watch / Currencies / Forex Trading

By: Submissions

The EUR/USD currency pair has continued its upward movement, rising from 1.0777 to a high of 1.1132 and successfully breaking above the 1.1100 resistance level. This strong performance suggests that further gains are possible, although a minor consolidation may occur first, with the next target around 1.1200.

Friday, August 23, 2024

Gold Mid-Tier Mining Stocks Fundamentals / Commodities / Gold & Silver Stocks 2024

By: Zeal_LLC

The mid-tier and junior gold miners in this sector’s sweet spot for upside potential just finished reporting truly-spectacular quarterly results.  Fueled by dazzling record gold prices and lower mining costs, smaller gold miners’ unit earnings skyrocketed to their highest levels ever.  Those incredibly-rich profits have left mid-tiers even more undervalued relative to prevailing gold prices, portending massive catch-up rallying.

The leading mid-tier-gold-stock benchmark is the GDXJ VanEck Junior Gold Miners ETF.  With $5.5b in net assets mid-week, it remains the second-largest gold-stock ETF after its big brother GDX.  That is dominated by far-larger major gold miners, though there is much overlap between these ETFs’ holdings.  Still misleadingly named, GDXJ is overwhelmingly a mid-tier gold-stock ETF with juniors having little weighting.

Gold-stock tiers are defined by miners’ annual production rates in ounces of gold.  Small juniors have little sub-300k outputs, medium mid-tiers run 300k to 1,000k, large majors yield over 1,000k, and huge super-majors operate at vast scales exceeding 2,000k.  Translated into quarterly terms, these thresholds shake out under 75k, 75k to 250k, 250k+, and 500k+.  Today only three of GDXJ’s 25 biggest holdings are true juniors!

Friday, August 23, 2024

My GCSE Exam Results Day Shock! 2024 / Politics / Educating Children

By: Anika_Walayat

It's GCSE results day and so I am off early to School, and the results are a shocker! Find out if it's a good or bad shock!

Saturday, August 17, 2024

Orwell 2024 - AI Equals Loss of Agency / Politics / AI

By: Nadeem_Walayat

Humans have fought tooth and nail to gain agency, freedom from the Lords of the Manor but here in the 2020's we are in the process of giving up our agency to the machine intelligence. It means over time humans will become dumber and dumber as the AI will do much of our thinking for us as we perceive the AI to have superior judgment to us mere mortals with limited knowledge whist the AI can call on all of human knowledge.

Already the high priesthood of AI professes that he AI will know us better than ourselves, META already states that it's algorithms can predict a lot about it's users just through analysis of our interactions with it's platforms.

Saturday, August 17, 2024

Gold Prices: The calm before a record run / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2024

By: EWI

The basis for analysis and forecasting at Elliott Wave International is fundamentally different from everyone else’s.

Here's a prime example in gold.

This excerpt is from the March Elliott Wave Financial Forecast, when gold was trading below $2,050/oz.

Saturday, August 17, 2024

Gold Mining Stocks Fundamentals / Commodities / Gold & Silver Stocks 2024

By: Zeal_LLC

The major gold miners just reported their best quarterly results ever!  Record gold prices combined with lower mining costs catapulted unit earnings to dazzling new records.  Yet despite exploding profitability, gold stocks continue to lag gold’s mighty upleg.  This anomaly won’t last, as investors increasingly realize how seriously undervalued this sector remains.  The resulting capital inflows will drive gold stocks way higher.

The GDX VanEck Gold Miners ETF remains this sector’s dominant benchmark.  Birthed way back in May 2006, GDX has parlayed its first-mover advantage into an insurmountable lead.  Its $14.0b of net assets mid-week dwarfed the next-largest 1x-long major-gold-miners ETF by nearly 25x!  GDX is undisputedly the trading vehicle of choice in this sector, with the world’s biggest gold miners commanding most of its weighting.

Gold-stock tiers are defined by miners’ annual production rates in ounces of gold.  Small juniors have little sub-300k outputs, medium mid-tiers run 300k to 1,000k, large majors yield over 1,000k, and huge super-majors operate at vast scales exceeding 2,000k.  Translated into quarterly terms, these thresholds shake out under 75k, 75k to 250k, 250k+, and 500k+.  Those two largest categories account for nearly 4/7ths of GDX.

Saturday, August 17, 2024

AI Computers Hype / Stock-Markets / AI

By: Nadeem_Walayat

Lots of hype in the media about AI computers such as which Microsoft announced. Only problem is there is no compelling reason to upgrade to an AI computer, what are you going to do with it?

Friday, August 16, 2024

Is Stocks Rally Showing Signs of Exhaustion? / Stock-Markets / Stock Markets 2024

By: Paul_Rejczak

Stocks further accelerated their uptrend yesterday, with the S&P 500 index closing 1.61% and reaching new local highs above the 5,500 level. The market has retraced almost all of its declines from the August 1 local high of 5,566.16. The rebound surprised a majority of traders and the question is: Will the market go straight to new highs, or will it reverse at some point and retrace the rally? For now, there have been no confirmed negative signals; however, this morning, the S&P 500 is likely to open 0.6% lower, as indicated by futures contracts.

Thursday, August 15, 2024

AI Tech Stocks Portfolio / Companies / AI

By: Nadeem_Walayat

Current state of portfolio is 79.4% invested, 20.6% cash, though 9.76% is in crypto's which is meant to be temporary, i.e. I plan to exit virtually all of my crypto positions during the crypto bull market where the key risk is that it ends a lot earlier than expected, so effective percent invested in stocks is 70%.

All of the primaries and secondaries have delivered huge profits except Tesla and Apple. Even crappy IBM has delivered on its spike to $200 prompting heavy trimming, the big surprise was Micron, I was not expecting $130+! As for sleepers, Samsung has also delivered whilst Intel continues to snooze. All whilst most investors have a large chunk of cash parked in money market accounts because they listened to clown Cramer and the CNBC cartoon network so they are missing out on one of the greatest bull markets in history, what else can you call Nvidia 10xing in 18 months!

Thursday, August 15, 2024

We got the Stock Market Selloff — Now what? / Stock-Markets / Stock Markets 2024

By: Submissions

Editor’s note: Today, RiskHedge Executive Editor Chris Reilly sits down with Stephen McBride to discuss the recent market selloff and what investors should expect leading up to the US presidential election...
***
Chris Reilly: Stephen, we got the selloff you’ve been anticipating.

Here’s your warning from June:

Markets aren’t usually this easy or consistent. And remember, in an average year, the S&P 500 suffers a decline of 14%. My guess is we’ll get a correction in that ballpark sometime before November’s election.

Thursday, August 15, 2024

BRICS, Inflation, Turmoil, and CDBC – What to DO? / Stock-Markets / Financial Markets 2024

By: Andy_Sutton

Our column last week prompted so many questions from new readers that we decided to start from scratch. Long-time readers will recognize much of what we’re about to say, but we ask that you take the time regardless since we’re adding in valuable context that has been provided over time. Just looking at the world today, your first thought might be: crazy! However, compared with even a few years ago, things are much clearer. So, without further ado…

Thursday, August 15, 2024

How Gold Can Save the US Dollar / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2024

By: MoneyMetals

Can we save the dollar before central banking kills it?

Our deficits are now stuck at 8% of GDP — unprecedented in peacetime. And our national debt just hit $35 trillion — unprecedented in the history of man.

Even the central bankers realize that this isn't sustainable. That we are coming to the day our paper money utopia crumbles.

Historically, from Song Dynasty China to Weimar Germany, when paper dies we return to hard money. Because backing the dollar with hard money like gold -- and eventually Bitcoin -- is the only way to finally kill the money printer.