Hard Money Newsletter Review

Market Oracle, much like Safehaven – a clean, well-organized, article farm with a well developed commodities section.

Up until the last minute, I was ready to wrap this up and conclude that Market Oracle devotes too little space to my beloved silver and that it primarily functions (from a the silver investor’s standpoint) in getting the word out generally about precious metals -but definitely weighs too heavily on the technical side to the markets.

Then there was this:

Peak Silver and Mining by a Falling EROI

And then this:

Silver set to Soar as it did in the 1970’s

So I had to change my mind a bit.

But first a word on where I was going…

Some find fundamentals to be boring. I guess it depends on your perspective, or your motivations for evaluating a market.

People I’m mainly concerned with  are those looking at silver, (or more specifically silver coins), as a long-term investment, and therefore care more about fundamentals.

In fact, the fundamentals and silver, because they have been ignored for so long, lost to the mainstream, are precisely why the people who can afford a small long-term investment will eventually flock to this area.

It’s more difficult to say the same thing about gold. In most of the content and commentary at Market Oracle was focused on gold, and not silver. (Until very recently!)

Frankly, I’m tired of technicals.

As a pure silver bug, I can do without another chart, or another wave analysis, with moving averages, pivot points, and the like.

The lure of the technicals makes sense, and good writers do it well. And make no mistake, there is no shortage of talented writers here. Contributers – link

Looking at charts and patterns provides a way to stay excited, a way to feel like you’re a part of the game.

We all need a little excitement.

For us, technical analysis  provides a way to rationalize an investment space that has traded Contrary to fundamentals for many many years.

In silver, The fundamentals are simply not in play. That’s probably the understatement of the year.

Believe me, you and everybody else will know it once silver begins trading based on fundamentals again.

To be fair Market oracle is not completely technical. And now we’re talking silver too!

An example of this can be found here, in Merv Burak’s “Gold Topping Action Continues”, from Oct 25, 2009.

Mr. Burak starts out with a fair treatise on fundamentals, and even a healthy argument as to why we need to keep them in mind before we start looking at charts and historical pivot points and price points.

Of course, the rest of this very well written, but unfortunately, technical posts, goes on to evaluate markets for not traded based on fundamentals for a very long time, including metals and agriculture.

That said, Market Oracle is a place where you can get a good cross section of who the major technical experts and gols (and silver?) market commentators are – the writing professionals in this space.

Take a look and see if you recognize any Market Oracle contributors here.

There is no shortage of content – the risk is never catching up.

So at first, I hesitated to recommend this to you, the faithful silver coin investor, in the waiting in the trenches, the the poor man, not necessarily interested in the trade or the gamble – or even the fast buck.

But then, all of a sudden, as if ordained by some magical market force, two articles appear with a focus on silver!

This one, you should go check out today.

Perhaps my fear (and maybe yours too) about fundamentals being forever obscured are about to change?

We wait and see. In the meantime, we’ll be on the lookout for more silver coin-centric content and add Market Oracle to our feed.

If you are wondering about where I’m coming from with this – or or to get the overall perspective on what it means to be a silver coin investor, check out my free guide and E-course here.

Investment Underground, published by Contrarian Profits, another offshoot (this one genetically) of the Agora ‘Goliath’ is another one, you can skip.

We silver coin investors are a funny bunch. You see, folks lucky enough to have figured out a way and a place to store what little wealth they have left over have come to this from many a direction.

Typically, we are contrarian to begin with, salt of the earth types, with not a lot of extra income lying around to gamble with.

But there is a world that opens up around you when you discover the simplicity in holding silver. (Whether that world is above or below is a matter of debate).

Many find the idea of buying physical silver for investment uncomfortable and about as appealing as a romp through the wilderness on foot that leads to a campsite in the middle of nowhere.

This is okay with us because, as a group, we like low-impact wilderness and the lessons learned in fending for oneself. This includes a level of a preparedness that comes only after considerable thought and research.

As much as we might otherwise find the plushness of the towering casinos and the allure of the fancier things in life, our resource-circumstance limits us to a different existence.

However, we are never fully disconnected from the bright lights, big cities, and indoor pluming – no more than silver can be eliminated from most of inner workings that make these modern wonders possible.

Therefore, our quest includes the need to know how our precious metal functions in the modern world, whether we are considering the markets, the industries that use silver, or the greater macro-economic or geopolitical trends that influence the value of our little stash of silver coins.

So in the quest for knowledge, there is much crossover, and we invariably come across letters and publications like “Investment Underground” – and so will you.

When you have a passion for this market, and an open curiosity, it’s easy to lose a sense of oneself and find yourself pouring over an investment offer carefully designed to lure you in.

Have fun with it. For there will perhaps come a day for this in the not-too-distant future – when you find yourself in a position to ‘leverage’ your silver coin investment. When that day comes, you’ll likely return to this email newlsetter. But for now, here’s the deal:

First off, when you sign up for investment underground,(watch the pop-up),you get a pretty steady flurry of content in your inbox.

And this part of a well-oiled machine. So, you can sit back and dabble a little from time to time – pick out a headline and then leave it be.

This is information marketing at its best. So, you’ll need to learn how to read with your silver coin identity firmly entrenched and allow yourself to dream a little, while checking any remorse for not being able to gamble – at the door.

Much of the content is specifically designed to hook you into reading and then, clicking. More often not, you get stuck reading what turns out to be an advertisement for one or another investing program.

Also, if you’ve read Addison Wiggin or will Bonner over at the Daily Reckoning or if you simply keep up with Chuck Butler’s Daily Pfennig, you can get the gist of what these e-mails cover in a broad macro-sense. You can pretty much stick with those guys. You’ll get the same message:

With the recent and ongoing financial crisis, and the amount of information sloshing around out there, crossing in and out and overlapping with similar content to Investment Underground, it makes it even more strenuous to put up with a message that shoots a little bit to the side or over the head of the typical silver investor.

And as much as I’d like to support the family affair (Will Bonner is Bill Bonner’s son), things must, at some point, come back down to earth for the silver coin investor.

Well, unfortunately for them, it doesn’t speak loud enough to the average investor.

In that most of us are just looking for a way to acquire a few more coins, and get a better understanding of how and why and what goes on in the macro world and how it affects our small world.

We need to make the connections between the broad market conditions and how they impact things that matter most to us like, silver supply tightness, industrial versus investor demand, and the ongoing and relentless price manipulation.

Of course, very few investing news sources currently give the time to those specific areas of interest, but we believe in time they will as more people will need to know.

Like many other newsletter publications, and yes, this one is free (so what could it hurt to try it out), they seem better directed toward where a lot of us are likely to be in a year. Further down along the way, maybe coming up out of the canyon, a little heavier with a few more coins on board.

But again, for the average silver investor, who has a sense of why silver is important, and where it will likely go in terms of price. You can probably skip this one.