You wanted to know a bit about me. Yes, I hail from Ohio, the state named after an attractive but otherwise useless nut. As for my PM experience, I guess you could say it started in my days as a paperboy/coin collector, when I accumulated a small stash of silver coins back when they were in common use. I remember the first clad quarter I saw, how cheap it looked, and decided to take as much silver out of circulation as my small budget allowed. Then came university, a wife and four kids, establishing my practice, etc. With no money to speak of, I had to sit out the big move of the seventies, occasionally buying a few coins and saving the gold scrap from dental castings. (yes, i even cast my own gold crowns in those days)
Fast forward twenty years and I am checking out the y2k thing on Gary North’s site; it’s 1998 or thereabouts. One of the links on his site led me to gold-eagle and there I read the Frank Veneroso study of how gold was being secretly sold from central bank sources, keeping the price under control. It was for me an eye opener, and I resolved to educate myself in the matter, reading everything I could on the ge site and others. I shifted what money I had from mutual funds to individual stocks, including, but not limited to pm stocks, studied what I could about investing in general, TA, FA, you name it. I know a lot more now, but of course, I’m far from an expert. I was very fortunate, I realize, to get in early.
Right now, my biggest exposures in PM shares is in companie with big deposits, coming into production or in advanced feasibility studies. I have a few shares in established majors and a bunch of small bets on lottery ticket explorers. Some favorites are ssri, ecuxf,aunff,mneaf,mfn,sa,ng,nak- you get the idea. I also have my physical, which, thanks to the recent washout, is approaching the value of my shares. As for how I am weathering this debacle, I ask two questions, One -Do I have at least as many mineable, in-the-ground ounces in good locations under good management represented by my shares, as I did before? Two–Do I see an investment area that I believe will outperform the PM shares over the near-term future? For me, the answers are “yes” and “no”, in that order, so, for my core position, about 80 percent of my holdings, for me, I am sitting tight for now, and this morning I have even rotated some of my non resource stocks into bargain basement miners. Yes, I do a bit of trading using technical analysis, but my confidence level here only lets me do it with about a fifth of my holdings. One more thing, since I don’t know what is coming down the pike, I am probably more diversified in my assets than most gold bugs, if you aren’t sure of what you are doing, diversification is probably a good thing, it has saved me from much of the pain of the last few weeks.