Bitcoin’s Looking Great. Gold Not So Much.

A Tale of Two Assets. Plus an update on gold miners.

Today, we are going to look at gold, bitcoin, and our way of playing it, MicroStrategy (NASDAQ:MSTR), which has now 10xd (!) since we first covered it last year. Amazing.Finally, there’ll be a short update on gold miners. Remember them?

Let’s start with gold.

Gold – and most other metals – has been hit since the U.S. election last week. It’s down $200, or about 7%, with U.S. dollar strength being a big factor (the dollar has been storming higher since October).

While I think this bull market might be punctured, as I put it last week, and that gold probably has a bit further to fall, I am not unduly worried. 2024 has hitherto been a great year for gold, and it remains an essential long-term core holding.

It is an even more essential holding for UK investors. I think sterling has big problems ahead of it, and gold serves as your hedge against crap governments.

Labour or Tory – I’m no fan of either.

They’re both as bad as each other, in my view. The less government there is, the better things run. But that’s irrelevant idealism. Of greater concern here is reality: there has never been a Labour Government that did not devalue sterling.

· Blair and Brown crashed sterling in 2007-8 (though until then their record was okay);

· Under Wilson, Callaghan, and Healey, we ended up going to the IMF in 1976. Callaghan and Wilson also devalued in 1967.

· Cripps and Attlee devalued in 1949.

· Ramsay MacDonald’s National Government, which followed Labour from 1929-31, took us off the gold standard in 1931.

Why should this Labour Government be any different? If anything, it is even less competent. Sterling devaluation is coming. How exactly might not yet be clear. I rather suspect it’ll be an attempt to make us competitive against an ultra-streamlined US, but that’s just a guess. You must own some gold (and some bitcoin) in such an environment: non-government money.

Bitcoin’s Looking Great. Gold Not So Much.

A Tale of Two Assets. Plus an update on gold miners.

Let’s start with gold.

It is an even more essential holding for UK investors. I think sterling has big problems ahead of it, and gold serves as your hedge against crap governments.

Labour or Tory – I’m no fan of either.

· Blair and Brown crashed sterling in 2007-8 (though until then their record was okay);

· Under Wilson, Callaghan, and Healey, we ended up going to the IMF in 1976. Callaghan and Wilson also devalued in 1967.

· Cripps and Attlee devalued in 1949.

· Ramsay MacDonald’s National Government, which followed Labour from 1929-31, took us off the gold standard in 1931.

In Singapore, Bloomberg reported that retail buyers crowded United Overseas Bank, the city’s only bank selling physical gold, until customers without pre-orders were turned away.

In Sydney, lines stretched into the street outside ABC Bullion after Friday’s selloff. Thai investors held existing positions instead of selling into weakness. In China’s Shuibei district, ahead of the Lunar New Year, buyers stepped in, and local prices held premiums over exchange benchmarks.

“It’s still a buying market,” said Globlex Securities CEO Thanapisal Koohapremkit. Quiet accumulation doesn’t announce itself. It just keeps happening.

AI tools are incredibly useful and AI stocks remain richly valued. Yes.

New tech will also create new, productive and higher paying jobs. Ones we haven’t even dreamed up yet.

In the meantime, the jobs market is being measured by the tools needed to calculate the economy without knowing what the new jobs will be.

For months, speculation swirled like chimney smoke in a snowstorm. Would Trump tap a dove? A loyalist? A Wall Street man in a red hat? Warsh checks none of those boxes — and all of them.

He’s a former Fed governor, a Goldman alum, and a card-carrying skeptic of central bank omnipotence.

He’s said, “The Fed is not independent from government. It is independent within government,” which sounds like something out of a fortune cookie written by Hayek.

He doesn’t want the Fed playing God, and he’s not keen on printing money to mop up Congress’s mess. He believes in limits. In credibility. In consequences.

Corporate insiders began ringing the cash register just as the S&P 500 touched 7,000. Given that the market is up over 40% from last April’s “Liberation Day” lows, a modicum of profit-taking is wise.