Fleet Street Letter Review

Read the Fleet Street Letter Review here.

Gold is a Risky Investment

I have not updated this blog in a while, but thought it was worth reminding people of something that has not been true for many years - Gold is a Risky Investment. Now, this might seem ridiculous, especially considering I will further quantify it by saying I believe in the long-term fundamentals, international inflation prospects of Western nations and the will of government to do all it can to save it’s own skin at the expense of your life savings. Given that last factor, especially, nothing will do as well in the next 10 years as gold…except maybe silver…and food…but that is for another day.

However, look at where the price of gold is now. No-one should be surprised to invest and see it fall, even short term, by 40-50% back to the 900$ level. What am I basing this on? It is exactly what happened in 1976, when it fell from 200$ to 100$, even as the long term trend was for gold to move another 5 times higher in 4 years. 1976 must have been a very hard year to sit there and talk to your friends about gold and reconcile the long term belief with what was really happening in the market.

The point I want to make is that anything is a risk, but gold is much more of a risk at 1800$ than it was at 400$, when it really could not have fallen much further at all.

What can you do about it, even if you want to invest in gold or silver now? Invest monthly in small amounts, via physical bullion ETFs or the internet gold sites such as BullionVault or Goldmoney and promise within yourself to keep those monthly savings going, after all, falling prices mean you actually buy more ounces each month!

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QE III

No no, not some new luxury cruise liner, just observing that something weird is going on when the day the Bank of England announces it is going to devalue all existing money in circulation by creating £50bn out of thin air, the financial markets celebrate by increasing the value of the pound against every other currency.

So why is that exactly? Was £50bn less than the markets expected to be created out of nothing, or is the UK creating less new money than every other nation? I have no idea.

Think I will go and buy some silver.

Selftrade ISA Offering - £175 ISA bonus act before 30th April

Selftrade are offering a pretty impressive ISA deal this year, whereby if you invest the full £10,500 in their ISA account by 30th April 2010, you get 10 free trades worth a total of £125 to use during May.

Not only that, but you can boost that by a further £50 by getting me to recommend you. Obviously, I'm more than happy to do this. You can do that by emailing me at alan@doityourselfisa.co.uk using the mail address matching that you want to apply for the account in.

All I can say is, if you're interested act as soon possible. This great offer dies on 1st May 2010. Best ISA offer I've seen so far this new tax year, for sure. In the interests of disclosure I'm happy to reveal that this is where my new ISA money is headed this year, for sure.

The AIGA saga

One of my key recommendations in my ISA Book is the diverse range of stockmarket-listed ETFs run by ETFSecurities. Reason being, that these inventive ETFs allow you to invest in the indexes tracking a wide range of commodities not normally accessible to normal investors such as ourselves. That includes such common staples as Corn, Wheat, Sugar, Cotton, Oil, Gold and Silver.

Long-term, as governments pump more money into the economy, the price of commodities in these devalued national currencies can only rise. And before you think it's only me saying this, then perhaps you'll listen to the opinion of uber-investor Jim Rogers, in his book Hot Commodities.

Well, shock, horror, this week, as AIG, the huge US insurance company faced financial problems of its own. Ah, but what's this got to do with the price of wheat, you may ask? Unfortunately, AIG manages the ETF soft commodity (Wheat, Livestock, etc.) ETFs on behalf of ETF Securites. A complex arrangement that is hard to follow, and created much uncertainty as to whether we'd even get our money back if AIG went under.

When they resume trading, we can probably expect mass redemptions of these ETFs. Here's a contrarian opportunity of ever I saw it. Funds at the ready, because with so many eager sellers, it could be worth taking a punt, because the US Government has already shown an intense desire not to let AIG fail, and anyway, there is guarantee that we would even lose our money if they did. With any luck, we'll see these ETFs trading at huge discounts to NAV. I think it's worth taking a risk, especially since the alternative is British pounds (for me), or exposing myself to the vagaries and fluctuations of our ailing economy through stocks.

Time to put a bit back in?

I was surprised to receive a letter recently for a tender offer for up to 40% of my holding in Fidelity Asian Values Investment Trust. While I'm used to this kind of thing happening, I've never seen it happen to Fidelity before, which probably says a lot about the kind of bear market we are experiencing. While I'm not exactly bullish on the future of the developed western world economies, I'm becoming steadily convinced, especially after the Olympics, that, to twist a metaphor slightly, the economic torch for the new century was passed from the USA to China, just as the UK passed it to the USA at the beginning of the 20th century.

Given all this, it's certainly not time to cash in my holdings in this trust at such a depressed price and also a 6.5% discount on the tender under the Net asset value of the trusts' assets. In fact, there may be some uplift in the share price to reflect the departure of less committed shareholders and a lift in the NAV.

Therefore, I'm recommending this trust as a long term BUY, as long as the discount is ten percent or greater. Even better, Fidelity are one of the trust providers that allow you to invest monthly in their trusts free of any brokerage fees, from an amount as low as £50 a month. Highly recommended.