There is no one more inclined and knowledgeable on where company profits are going than employees of the corporation. These “insiders” are having a bearish look on the stock market. In the past three decades there have been only 2 times such pessimism occurred:

• Beginning of 2007
• Beginning of 2011

Are you asking what is so special about these years? 2007 is obvious because it was the start of the mortgage crisis with Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. 2008 was the year of catastrophe with corporations pocketing “easy money” from TARP. This was the caffeine rush of Bush’ spending spree since 9/11. And we are still in the spiral of overspending 7 years later with Obama in office. In 2011, this is before the 20 percent or more decline in stock values. After the major decline, stocks went riding a huge tidal wave of increased stock prices.

When stock market goes down, we all know we should head to Treasuries. But, what about investing in bullion and paper gold? Goldman Sachs stated that gold is expected to be around $ 1,050 an ounce by end of the year. This is over $ 150 below the cost of mining the shiny metal. Why should we dig it when it is costing us more than its market worth?

Everyday ordinary citizens are up for a big surprise when Goldman Sachs, Societe General, and other investment banks force the price of gold to go down. Then the little people will be selling their gold and common stocks because both are heading down. This is not intellect; it is just plain fear. emotions is how you lose money on Wall Street. believe me, it has happened to me a few times in derivatives trading. When you get excitement and emotional, SIT ON YOUR HANDS!

How to make money in the bear market?  Invest on the downtrend, instead of your usual looking at the uptrend. There are not just bulls; there are also bears. Both make money while the pigs get slaughtered and the sheep get fleeced. Stop following everyone like a sheep and start doing your homework. Everything in life takes hard work to make it successful. Keep learning and asking questions.

 

To Your Health…

To your Wealth…

To Your Wisdom.

 

A lot of times in New York City I am just bored on Saturday. I hate spending so much money on Lincoln Center operas and Off Broadway shows just to fill my gap of boredom. Instead of spending money, I always enjoy window shopping for stuff I can not afford anyways. So, I walk up Madison Avenue to Barneys and do my window shopping. The rule in the upscale department store is: if you ask how much, you can not afford it.

So, I go looking and browsing at 3,000 dollar suits and 10,000 dollars and up in watches and jewelry. I always see the personal shoppers busy with clients wearing fur coats, Gucci sunglasses, and carrying there little poodle that is so small I can mistake for a Coney Island Nathan’s hotdog. The upper class woman gives the American Express card and charges her $ 10,000 purchase to it.

So, I sit and I am wondering if the woman is ever going to wear her 4 new dresses. Does she even like the color? Or does she just a shopaholic that just loves spending money? I never understood why a person would rely on a total stranger to do the shopping for them. I prefer the experience of trying the clothes on and the adventure of the shopping fun.

Then it pondered on me when standing on the 6th floor waiting to go down. Like a lightning flash in the dark sky, I got the idea that all Americans in all three classes use these “personal shoppers” all the time and they do not even know it. No, not all Americans wear $ 4,000 dresses and suits. But, they all do invest in pensions regardless of their careers or standard of living. Just about everyone today has a 401 k or traditional IRA.

We go to the bank and speak to our financial advisers so they can open a pension for us. We rely on their wisdom to find the best place to invest our money. But, we as everyday Americans can not ponder the thought that financial professionals are only interested in getting management fees from over hard earned dollars to pay for their new Aston Martin or month long vacation on Lake Como in Italy.

All one has to do is open a few books and see all there is to investing. If you enjoy throwing money to total strangers and believe they can invest best for you, then enjoy being robbed LEGALLY. If you just opened your eyes to the theft all over today, then you can make a few changes and be your own boss. So, what does one do with their hard earned money?

• Invest in tax free high interest Municipal Bonds
• Invest in Exchange Traded Funds to receive conservative returns with very low risk
• Buy physical bullion in gold, silver, and platinum
• Do not put all your eggs in one basket (buying one stock) and buy an Index fund invest in all companies in the sector

Wake Up! Control your own destiny! If you rely on LEGAL THIEVES to make you rich, you will not ever be rich. You will always be the same as you are now. The professionals get rich while you lose your one time opportunity to take a month long vacation with your loved ones in Summer. The internet is your one source for guidance and advice. Do your homework or else you get a BIG F on the final exam. Be smart and invest wisely; then you can retire 10 years or more early.

 

To Your Health…

To your Wealth…

To your Wisdom.

Easter is an American quintessential family holiday. We started Ash Wednesday for the beginning of Lent. This is a quite important holiday for me as an American Jew. Not in a religious sense per se. Instead, it is the starting point of Spring Cleaning for the upcoming eight days of Passover. To celebrate the misery of no bread for a week, one has to clean their house up until there is not one crumb of anything leavened in their house.

But, both holidays have one thing in mind: bring family back into what is supposed to be the American family like we see on The Brady Bunch. While the American family values get rebuilt from its slow and painful death from the 1960′s, there is an even bigger slow and painful death since then: Shopping Malls. Just like the family values of today, the shopping mall is suffering a long, long death. the industry took the MRI examination and it was confirmed they have an incurable Online Shopping Disease (OSD).

Renowned hedge fund manager Bill Ackman helped  save mall real estate investment trust General Growth Properties (GGP) from bankruptcy in 2009 . He turned $60 million into $1.6 billion in those 5 years of crisis in real estate.  But, Bloomberg reported last week that Ackman sold his final 28 million shares back to GGP via a buyback for $556 million. It looks like Ackman is taking his money and running from mall real estate. A good example is his loss of hope on JCPenney’s, one of the many dying retail companies. Sears, Macy’s, Radio Shack, and Kmart are a few of the next followers of Border’s, Caldor, and Woolworth’s.

Online retailers are basically transforming the way we shop in all advanced countries today. Mall real estate owners can always raise funds and money in three ways:

1. Raise their rental rate
2. Loan costs go down reducing interest payments
3. Market value of real estate goes up

Shopping malls have risen to the peak of their capacity in all three ways. They would lose tenants or lose capital assets. When you are at the top of Mount Hood, there is only one way to go: STRAIGHT DOWN! The picture above was the Canton Center Mall in Canton, Ohio. It gives a vision of what 2020 would look like when Cyber Monday puts Black Friday out of business.

So, where do we put our hard earned savings for investing? There exist very few Walmart, Kohl’s, TJ Maxx, or Target stores in malls. These big four retailers have a long way to compete with the online shopping revolution. They all have been vaccinated from OSD because they do a lot of online shopping services. I still prefer shopping at your local small retailer in my neighborhood. Yet, the convenience of these four retailers is amazing because they ship the product free of charge to the store of my designation the next day. Your local store would be a wait of up to a week to order a product because their inventory operations is on a much smaller scale.

Retail is not dead. Instead, it is transforming to keep up with our fast paced life. Make sure your investing ideas are also transforming with the new wave of shopping services. When companies grow, so do your dividends every 3 months.

 

 

To Your Health…

To Your Wealth…

To Your Wisdom.

 

 

Last Sunday was an all day spent with me nephew. We went off to the New Jersey Aquarium to see the otters, whales, and seals. Afterwards, we went to the Waterfront to play in the park and eat ice cream on a chilly weekend. Have you ever noticed that kids get so messy playing in the mud with all the dirt and mud? They surely have no care in the world with playing in the dirt.

It should bring back memories of your childhood. Yet, kids are much smarter than you think. They love dirt, sand, and soil. That is basically all they do: play with dirt. Well, all of us as grownups can also do the same and make out like a bandit from investing. Yes, you heard me right: investing in dirt. One of the most overlooked investments today is potash, better known as fertilizer. Both graphs below are two of the largest corporations. Plus they are two of the most hated companies by Wall Street because of that deep dive you see we had last August on the industry.

 

Motley Fool

 

 

 

Motley Fool

 

This is the secret to investing wisely and making huge profits:

• Industry is hated by everyone on Wall Street
• It is cheap
• And it has an uptrend

Looking at both companies, they were poorly performing last year compared to the S and P 500. In both companies, I put in 3 percent of my own portfolio each. This is the secret to diversification: do not put all your eggs in one basket. The same with dollars: do not put all your dollars in one investment.

Coming from a beef cattle family in Upstate New York, I can for sure be one of the many to tell you that agricultural investments is a great strategy. There are many different companies involved in your T-Bone steak dinner:

• Potash and fertilizers
• Food Processing Companies, E.X. Archer Daniels Midland
• Seed manufacturers, E.X. Monsanto
• Additives and Preservatives
• Packaging and Bottling, Crown Holdings

People are generally interested in High Technology, Big Pharma, or Banking as their key industries to focus on for investing. I strongly believe that diversification is the key to successful portfolio management. A diversified investor is one who hedges against the trying to beat Wall Street. Instead of gambling, invest by going with the flow and use Wall Street for your advantages. Do your homework and you will get an A+ in diversified investing.

 

To Your Health…

To Your Wealth…

To Your Wisdom.

Article from Tellurium Investing News

Source: Investing News Network

 

Unknown to many mainstream investors, tellurium (te-LOOR-ee-um) is a metal of rapidly-growing importance. While technically a metalloid in elemental form, tellurium’s role as a semiconductor has made its use in solar panels highly valuable with the expansion of solar power since 2008.

From its less-than-humble beginnings as a metal alloy used to increase steel and copper’s machining characteristics (it was used in the construction of the outer shell of the first atom bomb), tellurium’s role in thermoelectric applications and its ability to produce some of the highest efficiencies for electric power generation have pushed the element into resource market spotlights in recent years.

Outside of solar production, tellurium is used in rewritable optical discs (CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray), and for the new generation of random access memory (RAM) known as PRAM. However, it is in solar production that most tellurium investors have found the greatest prospects for the resource.

When alloyed with a number of other elements, such as cadmium, mercury, bismuth, and zinc, tellurium forms a telluride compound that enhances a material’s ability to conduct electricity; this ability is enhanced when also exposed to light. For that reason, tellurium, and cadmium telluride (CdTe) in particular, has become increasingly sought after as a source of thin-film photovoltaic solar panels since First Solar (NASDAQ:FSLR) proved the compound’s economic viability when it began mass commercial production of CdTe solar panels.

Tellurium production

In nature, tellurium is typically found fused in telluride ores of gold, copper, and silver. Currently, more than 90 percent of production is extracted as a by-product of copper mining and processing. Mined primarily in the United States, China, Japan, Canada, Russia, and Peru, the US Geological Survey predicts yearly production at levels of around 400 to 500 metric tonnes, but estimates are hard to gauge.

Some gold, bismuth, silver, and lead producers have also been able to extract tellurium in small quantities, but unless these companies focus directly on tellurium, their impact on this market is minimal. Confusion between gold and tellurium led settlers in Telluride, Colorado to mistakenly believe that tellurium was present in high quantities in the former gold mining town.

Market use

The growth of low-cost thin-film solar cells in recent years has quickly pushed its predecessor to the backburner as thin-film panels represent a fraction of their production cost. As solar producers seek out new sources of tellurium for CdTe cell production, the market supply has been pushed to the brink of production as no surpluses in the market were present before the market demand crunch.

As a measure of its growing importance, tellurium prices in 2000 were around US $14/lb for 99.5 percent purity. Since 2009, the price of tellurium almost tripled from US $130/kg to around $400/kg in 2011. Prices have come down since the latter half of 2011, and are now trading at a high of $170/kg.

While the solar panel market is deeply influential in shaping tellurium market dynamics, tellurium is also highly dependent on copper market trends. But, with recent developments in copper production techniques, the availability of tellurium coming out of copper mining has reduced tellurium production. Combined with the rising demand for the material, the price of tellurium is expected to continue trending substantially upwards over the next five years.

While substitutes of the material do exist, including selenium, niobium, and tantalum, based on their thermodynamic characteristics, none of these materials possesses the high application quality of tellurium. As such, thin-film solar cell production is regarded as the primary end-use industry for tellurium that drives demand at the moment.

Active companies

Currently only a small handful of companies are engaged in producing tellurium. British Columbia exploration and development company,  Deer Horn Metals Inc. (TSXV:DHM) is one of the newest companies focused on bringing tellurium to market.

Montreal, Quebec-based 5N Plus, Inc. (TSX:VNP) is focused on both metal tellurium production and telluride compounds such as cadmium telluride, cadmium zinc telluride, and zinc telluride.

Chinese companies based in Yunnan province are also heavily active in tellurium production. Yunnan Chihong Zinc & Germanium Co. is among the largest currently operating, but it has only a minority focus on tellurium ingots.

Other companies, such as the Chinese subsidiary of Apollo Solar Energy (HK:0556,OTC Pink:ASOE), have focused on integrating telluride-based materials into their thermal exchange system production processes to cut out tellurium production supply risks.

While a growing number of companies will likely seek out tellurium production in the wake of growing demand, only those that can produce high-purity tellurium, 99.5 percent or higher, will be able to adequately supply thin-film solar panel producers.

Commercial-grade tellurium is usually marketed as minus 200-mesh powder but is also available as slabs, ingots, sticks, or lumps.

 

To Your Health…

To Your Wealth…

To Your Wisdom.

Source: InvestDiamond.com  This article was written by DiamondInvestingNews.com

Interest in diamond investing is on the rise, but many investors still have questions about the best way to get involved. After all, choosing a diamond company to invest in can be difficult, as can figuring out if a physical stone is a good investment. 

InvestDiamond.com, which was launched last year by gold and silver trading platform LinGOLD.com, believes that it has the solution to those — and other — problems. The company describes itself as “the only online platform that allows members to trade in diamond fractions rather than entire stones,” and is aimed at making diamond trading easy and affordable.

To find out more about what InvestDiamond.com offers, Diamond Investing News (DIN) spoke with Linnea Bruce, project manager at the company. In the interview below, she explains how the website works and who it is aimed at. In closing, she gives her outlook on where diamond prices are headed in the short and long term.

DIN: Starting off with an easy question, what is InvestDiamond.com and what inspired LinGOLD.com to create it?

LB: The concept behind InvestDiamond.com is that there are batches of diamonds that have specific characteristics, and members become co-owners of these batches — they can buy fractions as small as 0.001 carats, which means investing can start at US$15. The idea is to bring diamond investment to everyone.

LinGOLD.com is a gold and silver trading platform, and they were looking for a way to further diversify with tangible assets. They researched, doing market studies and looking at the Bain reports, and diamonds seemed like the next logical step for a new project.

DIN: Can you tell me more about the fraction trading system that InvestDiamond.com uses? It sounds pretty unusual.

LB: It is. As mentioned, members can buy fractions as small as 0.001 carats; on the website there’s a trading panel, so they can decide how many millicarats they want to buy and also put in their price. The price that’s there by default is a price quotation from the website, and it’s calculated via a mix of supply and demand on the website, and also with respect to the Rapaport price.

The Rapaport price that we use is for a 1-carat diamond, E color, VVS1. If we see that the price on the website is starting to become a speculative bubble, or is getting too far away from the Rapaport price, then we inject diamonds into the system at a reasonable price to bring the price quotation down to near the Rapaport price.

Members can also sell their fractions using the same trading panel — they put in the number they want to sell, or they can put in their own price. If they are above the quotation price, that’s fine, it just means they may need to wait a little while to find someone to buy at that price.

DIN: Normally diamonds are valued subjectively (ie. there’s no simple cost-per-ounce valuation system), which can make some people hesitant to invest. Does using batches address that concern?

LB: Yes. We decided to have batches of several different types of quality — we’ve chosen to have investment-grade diamonds, but not all stones of 1 carat, D color, internally flawless, which are really rare and could create a speculative bubble effect. That allows us to show what an average InvestDiamond.com carat would look like and come up with an average price.

DIN: And reselling diamonds is fairly easy? I know that can also be a big concern for people interested in investing in diamonds.

LB: It’s definitely easy to resell because the diamonds are stored in Switzerland in a free port zone. That means members don’t have to pay the value-added tax (VAT). As a result, it’s easier to resell and make a profit on reselling.

And, as there are many other members buying at the same time, members always have a buyer ready as they’re selling.

DIN: Okay, so the diamonds held by your clients are actually physical products. Where do you source those diamonds from? And what kind of diamonds are they?

LB: We have a supplier located in Antwerp. They actually cut the rough diamonds, and all the diamonds they receive come from countries that respect the Kimberley Process — they’re not conflict diamonds.

Those diamonds are between 0.5 and 2 carats, and they’re between internally flawless and VVS2. They’re between D, E and F and they’re all colorless.

DIN: Would a client be able to take possession of their diamonds if they wanted, or does that not work with the fraction system?

LB: They can’t take a diamond out of its batch, but if they’ve invested in the site, what they can do is sell those fractions and then buy a diamond from our supplier.

However, if they do that, then they have to pay the VAT tax and it’s less of an investment. In France, at least, it’s 20 percent, and getting that back would be pretty difficult.

DIN: Do people often choose to buy in that way?

LB: No, not really. We get requests sometimes, but people who do that are generally doing it for jewelry purposes, more for pleasure than for investment.

DIN: Who is InvestDiamond.com aimed at? Can someone who’s new to the diamond space get involved, or is it for more experienced investors?

LB: It’s actually for both. Since the trading panel for buying and selling is pretty simple, you don’t have to be an experienced trader to understand how it works. We also have a 40-page guide with lots of information to educate people, and the FAQs on our help page explain a lot about diamonds — where they come from, what criteria there are, things like that.

At the same time, we of course welcome people who are experts in diamonds. Right now we’re developing an expert mode so clients can place different kinds of orders — they’ll be able to pass more complicated orders and decide what the expiration date is, or what prices they want to buy between.

DIN: Have you seen a lot of investor interest thus far?

LB: We launched in France in November, and since then we’ve had somewhere around 750 members. Our English site just went up a couple of weeks ago, so I don’t have stats on that one. But yes, we’ve had a good deal of interest.

DIN: Finally, what’s your 2014 price outlook for diamonds?

LB: Our outlook for 2014 is that diamond prices will be relatively stable. Looking farther than a year, we think diamond prices will increase because they’re becoming more rare — even though there are new mines opening, there haven’t been many discoveries of new deposits. Also, demand is increasing, especially in China and India.

 

To Your Health…

To Your Wealth…

To Your Wisdom.

We all know what is shale gas. We see Bakken reserves in North Dakota and many other reserves in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Texas. Back in 1970′s it sounds science fiction that we get energy from solar heat called sun gas. Yet, researchers claim that natural gas power plant efficiency can be as high as 25 %. Solar ThermoChemical, LLC has coughed up a good $ 850,000 to do research in hopes of commercializing sun gas very soon.

This is great technology. But, the graph above comes from the US Environmental Protection Agency. The question is how much good it sun gas when many places have moderate or below moderate sun exposure the whole year. While it would be great technology for New Orleans, how would it be for Alaska or Manitoba? Is solar energy a dead idea on Wall Street? We can look at General Electric as an example.

General Electric has also thrown down its arms. GE had boasted of building America’s biggest solar panel factory using technology acquired from a Cd-Te startup Prime Solar. The company had said its efficiency would be higher than FSLR and its costs would be lower. GE had earlier announced that it was going slow in its expansion plans and now the company has given up by selling its technology to its arch rival FSLR and firing 50 workers. Again to any solar industry watcher, this was inevitable. I don’t foresee more than 5 thin film solar companies surviving this downturn and am not sure that First Solar will be able to keep up its thin film technology. Green World Investor

 

We see how solar energy stocks have started out the new year. People have thought of it as a hated stock with no confidence from Wall Street. These are two of the three keys to invest in a hated industry. It is missing one more; it needs to start an uptrend. When the uptrend is in motion, then all contrarian investors can make a bang with their bucks.

Just like America, Europe has has backed off the idea of solar energy being the future. China is jumping on the hay wagon while most advanced economies have lost confidence in solar energy. It would be a great technology for China because it would lessen their dependence on Russia, US, and Canada for natural resources for their 1.4 billion citizens. It is interesting also to see where China is going in 2014:

• Buying lots of gold to go back to gold standard
• Invest in solar technology to eliminate dependency of other nations
• Eliminate US Dollar in trade relations with other countries

The ideas we back off, China takes and turns it into a new age technology. I see a great opportunity in investing in solar energy in the long run. For a quick buck, go to Atlantic City and see if you can win. For growing your wealth, look at long term. With solar at the bottom, it can only go up from here. When an uptrend comes in, look for opportunities.

To Your Health…

To Your Wealth…

To Your Wisdom.

Washington DC politicians have planted a ticking bomb ready to implode the US economy one day. They are not a bunch of lawyers; they are all farmers. They have sowed the fields of economic destruction. Spring is coming in another 30 days. We shall see economic turmoil bloom with the crocuses and daffodils. Unlike the carrots and tomatoes grown in California, there will not be a sweet taste to the coming apocalypse from kicking the can down the road for the past 50 years. The Federal Reserve graph above can explain how much the US national debt went into 4th gear going 85 miles per hour. During the height of the Cold War in the 60′s and 70′s, our debt limits were very reasonable. Do not get me wrong; I am not anti-debt. Debt is good for raising funds for building new schools, expanding highways, and mass transit finances. Debt is like a one pound bag of M and M’s: you take a handful and they taste good; you take the whole bag and you get a stomach ache. The same going with printed excess money; it gives severe aches and pains. Look at how debt now dominates the entire world still today. The BIG FOUR economic powers (China, Japan, European Union, and US) of the world all are in downward spiral direction thanks to massive debt:

• The U.S. requires perpetual debt-ceiling hikes instead of balancing the budget

• The euro zone remains exposed to a banking system sinking like the Titanic on its own sovereign debt

• Japan is doing everything possible to have debt twice its national GDP

• China can no longer grow sufficiently without manipulating its debt overload

That’s just the big four. And we’ve seen recently how these threats can manifest themselves in emerging market turmoil. Turkish Lira and Argentina Peso are great examples of emerging market turmoils because of the BIG FOUR not handling their own economic troubles. If the intentions of DC is to weaken the emerging markets, then they are doing a great job. Wall Street Fat Wallets are always up for taking control of all economic powers in the rigged Wall Street investment industry. One does not need all this economic information that sounds Greek to the average person. In plain English, we just need to look at the national confidence of the population. Where do we go for such information. We go to Christmas shopping season. Almost every retailer was lacking profits behind Wall Street’s expectations. JCPenney’s and Macy’s were a shocker to many. Big name retailers are following Border’s and Nobody Beats The Wiz in becoming defunct retailers with lots of debt. If consumers in most OECD member countries have no confidence, then what does this tell your average American, Canadian, and European? Do you feel that we are succeeding our goals? Do you have the used car salesman smile even though we are shrinking our economies? The demand for physical, not paper, gold today really shows the strong beliefs that people really have in their economies and governments. What is the solution? Me personally, I am buying one ounce physical silver. I truly am a fanatic of Perth Mint Certificate Program. Unless you are an Aussie citizen, there is no other program for investing and storing physical precious metals. Many people say go and buy gold. This is great advice. Yet, I personally prefer investing in silver because:

• US Government had no confiscation on silver in 1933
• About $ 20 an ounce makes it easy for purchases while gold is $ 1,400 an ounce
• Recognizable by anyone and everyone
• Easy to invest and buy from any bullion dealer

It is up to you for preparations for the upcoming economic turmoil for 6 billion people one day. To Your Health… To Your Wealth… To Your Wisdom.