[theluckycountry]

VT,
Thats sort of where I keep coming to. Poking around at REITS. No place to store physical gold, which in the past had been confiscated.

Like a gun can be confiscated if you leave it lying around at the wrong times. BLM protests, Katrina.
The gold confiscation back 90 years ago is now clouded in myth but if you research it you will find that it was only massive hoards in safe deposit boxes that got taken, that and the large stashes of trembling citizens. You were legally allowed to hold up to ten ounces, but 10 or 200, whose to know when it's buried in a backyard.

[vtsnowedin]

Other then wedding rings and a few bits of other jewelry I own no gold. If you bought and held it ten years ago you have gained nothing per ounce and even the low inflation during that period has eaten away at you investment.
I like low cost broad market index funds that will only go down if the whole country ends up in the dumpster. Currently I own FNILX and ONEQ. FNILX tracts the whole market and is up for me 17% over the last eight months. ONEQ tracks the NASDAQ and is up 11.3% over the last seven months.
They will not win every month or every year but they are a good bet to win every decade.

[Armageddon]

Gold isn’t an investment, it’s wealth

[vtsnowedin]

True but wealth left idle will get eaten up by inflation and holding costs.

[theluckycountry]

If you bought and held it ten years ago you have gained nothing per ounce and even the low inflation during that period has eaten away at you investment.

That's an example of what we call cherry picking. I could say the same about the Dow, if you bought it in 2000 and held it for 10 years you gained nothing and the rampant inflation over that period ate away at your investment. Gold on the other hand appreciated nearly 400%, negating any need for dividends.

The current US stock prices are a reflection of the desperation of investors around the world which have been pouring money in for well over a decade, seeking some return since their own markets have languished, the nikkei, the DAX etc. Australian pension funds even contribute, 25% of all savings go there. The value of the stock markets there is a complete joke at this point and analysts stopped scratching their heads years ago.

When it blows up again gold will continue to shine and shine brighter, but the untold millions of people with their life savings in paper will be in tears like in back in 2000.

[vtsnowedin]

While the ten year period you cherry pick was indeed a flat spot for the DOW look ten years before to now to see the long term trend.
Gold sitting in a vault does no work and returns no ongoing profits and only goes up in price when the world is in a panic. Funny thing is if things really went to pot all the gold bugs would find that they can't eat gold and things like food and ammunition would become the only currency there was any demand for.

[Newfie]

Actually 22LRHP or 2-3/4” #6 make a lot of sense because they are fungible and divisible into small easily carried quantities. You can buy a Snickers bar with either.

[vtsnowedin]

Actually 22LRHP or 2-3/4” #6 make a lot of sense because they are fungible and divisible into small easily carried quantities. You can buy a Snickers bar with either.

Well that is a far stretch and a SHTF projection but stranger things have happened.
I bought 100 22LRs today for the ridiculous price of $11.00 and a box of 300 Win mag for $60.00 and a pound of powder for the Win mag reloads. Total plus tax topped $100.00.
But if I had to I could get by for the rest of my life with what I now have on hand.
The 300 Win Mag is a new purchase so I needed to buy the reloading dies and enough loaded ammo to give me a working lot of cases to reload. Did not need that gun but it is very VERY nice and I am enjoying finding out what it is capable of.

[evilgenius]

They say older people should get into bonds. Government bonds of most kinds are safer than corporate bonds, usually. If that isn't diversified enough, some stocks are safer. If I remember correctly, the beta of a stock is a measure that refers to how volatile that stock is, in comparison to the rest of the market. I should think you can add to a set of safer bonds with some less volatile stocks that also offer dividends that look good to you.

Diversification is the best way to protect yourself, but you are also in a position where you don't want to lose everything. Personally, I am taking more risk. I am into the market. I am not getting into bonds, even though I will be 60 in a few years. I think there are trends at work in the world that are at least as safe as some of the less risky stocks to back with my risk taking. EV's will change so many things about how people relate to each other. It looks like there will be opportunity everywhere. I am trying to avoid the equivalent of the pet rock in all this, which came and went. Look at the newest one to shake their sexy electric pickup truck at you. It can go how many miles on a charge? The world of tomorrow is probably out there today, and it probably has a certain return if I get in at the right price.

Another thing that I am doing is that I am not trying to time the market. When a stock I am accumulating goes up, I cut back and start to ask myself if it has achieved a new level concerning which there will be whole new buying targets. I don't sell, hoping that the stock will go down and I can buy more shares with the same money. I was talking to a guy who is a little older than me the other day. He does that. I think that is a good way for the market to run on up and leave me behind, holding the bag the stocks were supposed to go into. Instead, if I want to try and reap some profit as I go, I think I need to add more shares to my positions than I will conceivably need later. Then, I can sell the excess over that whenever it looks like a particular stock has peaked in some way. That way, I could take profits from time to time, when market timing actually worked. The rest of the time, I could lose gracefully.

The only thing I am not certain of is how to view those sold shares in relation to the whole, how that will effect my average cost per share. I will have to do any profit taking with that in mind too, and taxes. It's risk management all the way around, isn't it? And, as I am only too aware, the EV thesis could get rolled up into something else. I own some things outside of the EV thing, you know. Some stuff is sort of contrarian, like how I buy now for an eventual rise in interest rates. I originally thought that would come about this year. Now, I think the Fed's bond buying program will have been enough to forestall that for a while.

[theluckycountry]

While the ten year period you cherry pick was indeed a flat spot for the DOW look ten years before to now to see the long term trend.

We could discuss these periods back and forward because there are many for each asset, so I will make it simple. Every time paper under-performs, Gold performs well. From 2012 to 2020 gold was flat and the dow was on it's way up. What you have to ask yourself now is, what will the next 10 years bring? Massive increases in the paper markets? If you believe that than keep away from gold. If you don't believe that, then now is a good buying opportunity, especially for silver which lags gold and has no fear premium attached to it.

[vtsnowedin]

They say older people should get into bonds. .

Yes that has been standard advice for decades but a point that was brought to my attention is that Social security and any other government pension can be considered a substitute for part or all of retired persons Bond portfolio. As I have both social security and a state government pension I need zero bonds especially at today's low rates combined with growing inflation.
I do have 20% of my investments in a 401K split between the two index funds I have mentioned. That is the low risk part of my investing.
The rest I have put into individual stocks I have chosen, ever hopeful of beating the market average but knowing the odds are against me long term. It would be wise to shift more of my money from those stocks into those index funds but that is boring and I do enjoy the game . My source of new cash is my beer money budget so if I lost it all I would just have to give up drinking which would please my wife and my doctor.

[vtsnowedin]

What you have to ask yourself now is, what will the next 10 years bring? Massive increases in the paper markets? .

I expect a period of high inflation that will not last long as the people causing it will not be in power long. Massive increases in stock prices? No not for ten years. What I do expect barring a major war is a steady increase in profits and dividends after adjusting for inflation that pretty much tracks the growth in GDP.
The price of gold is set by speculators and is a cumulative grope think not based on any real market demand. It like crypto currencies could drop by half or more anytime sentiment changed. I have seen this happen in the past. The stock market also has a speculation factor that has most stocks over priced well above their base fundamental book value. One estimate is that speculation value is a third of the current price but if the speculators all panicked and cashed out there would still be that real two thirds of the price backed by assets and earning potential.
I do love stocks that have a P/E less then 10 and pay a 3.5% dividend or higher.

[adonis]

I dont believe there will be a financial meltdown anytime soon the powers that be have announced to the governments the arrival of the great reset which now looks like it will come to fruition house prices will continue their upward tragectory along with gold and silver cryptos will probably get banned in the longrun the stockmarket will be propped up by infinite QE think 35000 is high wait till it hits 100000.

[AdamB]

I dont believe there will be a financial meltdown anytime soon the powers that be have announced to the governments the arrival of the great reset which now looks like it will come to fruition house prices will continue their upward tragectory along with gold and silver cryptos will probably get banned in the longrun the stockmarket will be propped up by infinite QE think 35000 is high wait till it hits 100000.

There is this thing, called a period, it is used to end sentences? You might have heard of them?

Anyway, you are speculating on some mighty good news for those of us who jumped into the market pretty hard after the 2008 crash, so happy days ahead sounds like a condensed version of your endless sentence?

[theluckycountry]

I dont believe there will be a financial meltdown anytime soon the powers that be have announced to the governments the arrival of the great reset which now looks like it will come to fruition house prices will continue their upward tragectory along with gold and silver cryptos will probably get banned in the longrun the stockmarket will be propped up by infinite QE think 35000 is high wait till it hits 100000.

Possibly... But you have to factor in profit taking, not the kind the average punter with his life savings invested in the market thinks of, but the type when Bill Gates and Buffet sold large portions of their stocks at the very top back before the GFC and rolled the profits into the Gates foundation, Tax Free. That's right, they avoided all the capital gains tax you and I would have to pay and in the end the foundation, and it's wealth, was under their direct control.

After that the market collapsed, Coincidence? How many other big players had inside knowledge that markets were about to be allowed to fall? Yes, they are propped up by the Fed and confidence "media preaching"

Now we see...
"Warren Buffett on Wednesday reached the halfway mark in giving away all of his Berkshire Hathaway stock, more than 99% of his net worth, to charity and resigned from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s board.

Charity?

Foundations receiving the money include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, Sherwood Foundation, Howard G. Buffett Foundation and NoVo Foundation.

Wherever the money goes you won't see but a fraction of it spent on the needy I can assure you. And will the market have a nasty reset back under 20,000 in the months ahead? Probably. There is nothing to stop it and this isn't 1933 where a relatively small group of investors bought directly into the markets. Now the vast majority of people are invested in them through their pension accounts and every month untold billions flows from working wages into the stock market.

Since this money MUST go there it creates a distortion in prices, that is why the market is going so high even though the underlying companies are mired in debt. At the top, those that engineered this system simply milk it at regular intervals, knowing that in a few years the pension accounts of the workers will have pushed it back up again. It's as fine a racket as I could imagine.

Private pension funds were introduced in the 1980's, and surprise surprise, the DOW took off like a sky rocket from that point on. By 2000 it was bloated, well worth milking.

[vtsnowedin]

If you adjust that graph for inflation after the end of the gold standard you get a more realistic picture of the value of the market.
Also consider that there are about 130 million more Americans today then were in the economy in 1970. That alone would account for about a 40% rise in the value of the economy as measured by the DOW.

[careinke]

If you adjust that graph for inflation after the end of the gold standard you get a more realistic picture of the value of the market.
Also consider that there are about 130 million more Americans today then were in the economy in 1970. That alone would account for about a 40% rise in the value of the economy as measured by the DOW.

True, the Fiat dollar has lost 95% of it's value since 1971 when Nixon "temporally" decoupled the Dollar from Gold. This makes the value the DOW today worth about $1,700 in 1971 dollars. Not very impressive.

Peace and welcome to the Metaverse.

[adonis]

Buffett said Wednesday he currently holds about $100 billion in shares of Berkshire Hathaway and that the $41 billion he has previously donated in shares has saved him only $0.40 in taxes per $1,000 given. 

"That's because I have relatively little income," he said. "My wealth remains almost entirely deployed in tax-paying businesses that I own through my Berkshire stockholdings, and Berkshire regularly reinvests earnings to further grow its output, employment and earnings."

Buffett said Wednesday that his remarks are "no swan song." But he added that while he still loves his job, "I'm clearly playing in a game that, for me, has moved past the fourth quarter and into overtime."

[udogermany]

This topic is very interesting

[Newfie]

This topic is very interesting

Welcome aboard.