Saturday, August 20, 2011

Mainstream Media still doesn't get it, but they are getting there

Hi all, I thought I would get these thoughts down while they were still fresh.

I have just come home from being interviewed on the Channel 9 Weekend Today Show (for international readers Channel 9 is Australia's leading national free to air channel) about the recent rise in the gold price. I got about 3 mins of live air time at 7:15am on a Saturday morning.

The interviewer asked me before we went on "So how will I know when I should be selling gold?" to which I responded "when you have me on at 7:15pm for 30 minutes every week, instead of 7:15am for 3 minutes every 6 months, just like you do now with Real Estate and Share analysts".

Although to give the Channel 9 producer her due she did manage to get a graphic put up for a few seconds showing the abysmal performance of the ASX200 (Australia's largest 200 companies) index vs. Gold over the last 5 years.

I was asked if gold was good place to invest for retirement savings (must have been the first time in TV history that has been asked - pity they didn't ask that in 2001), compared to the stock market. To which of course I answered in the affirmative, but with the warning that retirement savings need to be a long term investment, not short term speculation.

Ok here is the points I would liked to have mentioned, but in the three minutes I was prevented from doing (even though I had discussed most of them before going to air)
  • The average super fund investment for someone in their Forties has lost $20,000 - $30,000 in the last few weeks (based on a super balance of $200,000)
  • If the average 40 something had got off their arse 12 months ago and setup a Self Managed Super Fund (SMSF) and rolled over all of their super funds into their SMSF and then invested those funds in physical Gold their super would be up 25% today, ie grown by about $50,000
  • If that someone had invested the funds in physical Silver instead of Gold their super would be up 85% ie grown by $170,000 or $200,000 more than if they had continued to sit on their fat and now poor arse and let a "professional" money manager invest their super money for them.
On predictions, I wanted to say:
  • Within 5 years a million dollars worth of Silver will fit in a briefcase (just like Gold does now)
  • Within 10 years the US dollar price of Gold and Silver will be infinity, ie no one will be stupid enough to exchange any amount of Gold or Silver for any amount of US dollars.
  • In 15 years if you have $1,000,000 in your super fund it wont be considered a Nest Egg, it will merely be an Egg, ie you will be able to exchange it for an egg.

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