The Flying Frisby - money, markets and more

Dominic Frisby
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Readings of brilliant articles from the Flying Frisby. Occasional super-fascinating interviews. Market commentary, investment ideas, alternative health, some social commentary and more, all with a massive libertarian bias. www.theflyingfrisby.com

  1. 1 DAY AGO

    The Canterbury Tales and the AI Panic

    Good Sunday to you, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales in around 1400, and it is considered one of the first great works of English literature. Try reading it today and you might question the “English” part. Here’re the opening lines: Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, It does not get much easier. Canterbury Tales is the story of group of pilgrims who walk from Southwark to Canterbury Cathedral. I have done the pilgrimage myself and I would urge you to as well. The structure is quite simple. To pass the time, the pilgrims have to a storytelling contest and so each tells his or her tale. There are around thirty pilgrims - in effect, thirty professions, and so we get the Knight’s Tale, the Miller’s Tale, the Wife of Bath’s Tale and so on. Here is the interesting part. Since the story was written in 1400 we have had, off the top of my head, the printing press, the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, steam power, fossil fuels, the internal combustion engine, electricity, aviation, nuclear power, computers, the internet, smartphones and now artificial intelligence. And yet, if you look the list of characters below, every single one of Chaucer’s professions still exists in some recognisable form today. You could go all the way back to the dawn of civilisation and argue the same thing. We still have farmers. We still have merchants. We still have lawyers, doctors, religious people, soldiers, landlords, craftsmen, entertainers, administrators and hustlers. AI will change the nature of the job, but it will not erase the underlying human needs that created it. Machines put many farm labourers out of work at the turn of the 19th century, but they also generated enormous productivity, which created new industries and new jobs, and, it’s worth noting, productivity which enabled us to be able to ban slavery. The net result was not mass permanent unemployment but rising prosperity. What Actually Changes What does get destroyed is power structure. Feudalism has gone. The Church no longer dominates European politics - not the Christian Church, anyway. Guilds have faded. The landed aristocracy has all but gone. In their place we have the modern State, bureaucracy, multinational banks, global corporations, Big Tech, Big Pharma, the mainstream media and so on. AI is more likely to erode existing hierarchies than to eliminate work altogether. It will compress middle layers. It will reduce friction. It will concentrate power in some places and decentralise it in others. If you live in a third world country such as the UK, I urge you to own gold or silver. The pound will be further devalued, as will the euro and dollar. The bullion dealer I recommend is The Pure Gold Company. More here. The winners are likely to include: platforms, energy producers, owners of scare assets, large scale infrastructure, those who control distribution. AI is already being used in manufacturing, agriculture and mining, but so much to replace jobs as to increase productivity. You can’t help feeling the physical economy is a better place to be than parts of the digital - at least for now, though I guess robots are next if those Chinese videos doing the rounds are anything to go by. Who else wins? AI and machine learning engineers, obviously, certain content creators, those who get good at prompting will find it useful for anything from medicine to plumbing to consultancy. The losers will be among those whose job is mainly to control access to or verify information that AI can now do instantly. Think: interpreters and translators, proofreaders and editors, coders, copywriters and journalists, graphic designers, sales reps, basic financial advisors. I think long-distance drivers’ days are numbered too. The work doesn’t disappear but the pricing power and margins collapse. Legacy media distribution - not the content creators themselves, but the distribution gatekeepers who controlled which creators reached audiences. Publishers who mainly performed filtering rather than editing, talent agencies for routine work, certain music labels. The job may technically exist but the power and economics drain away. Chaucer’s Cast, Modernised Finally, below is Chaucer’s professional cross-section of medieval England. I have added approximate modern equivalents. * Narrator – content creator (!) * Host – Event organiser, podcast presenter * Knight – Army officer * Squire – Cadet, trainee officer * Knight’s Yeoman – Bodyguard, fixer, executive assistant * Prioress – Headmistress, senior religious leader * Second Nun – Clergy * Nun’s Priest – Chaplain * Monk – Monk * Friar – Fundraiser, community organiser * Merchant – Import–export, trader, entrepreneur * Clerk – Researcher * Man of Law – Barrister, judge * Franklin – Wealthy landowner, landlord, businessman * Haberdasher – Fashion retailer, Etsy seller * Carpenter – Builder * Weaver – Textile manufacturer * Dyer – Industrial processor * Tapestry-maker – Textile artisan * Cook – Chef * Shipman – Merchant mariner, sailor * Physician – Doctor * Wife of Bath – Self-made businesswoman * Parson – Parish priest * Plowman – Smallholder farmer * Miller – Construction materials supplier * Manciple – Buyer, procurement officer * Reeve – Estate manager, COO * Summoner – Bailiff, compliance officer * Pardoner – Carbon credit broker * Canon – Serial start-up founder, “entrepreneur’ * Canon’s Yeoman – Startup engineer The Real Question I think a fear frenzy is being whipped up - and I say this as someone who has lost his primary source of income (voiceovers) to AI. The work changes. The tools change. The leverage changes. The power centres change. The underlying human needs do not. There will still be farmers because people eat. There will still be merchants because people trade. There will still be storytellers because people crave stories. Most importantly of all, there will still be opportunities, if anything there will be more of them. AI will reduce headcount in some sectors. It will elevate productivity so dramatically that fewer people are required to produce more output. That is economic evolution. If you are worried about AI taking your job, ask yourself this: are you positioned inside an old power structure that is about to weaken? Or are you aligned with the next one forming? Join the gang. Until next time,Dominic ICYMI here is this week’s commentary Finally, Charlie Morris and I appeared on In The Company of Mavericks this week to discuss what’s been going on with gold, silver and bitcoin. (Charlie writes Atlas Pulse which I heartily recommend. Get your copy here - it’s free.) Links to Spotify and Apple podcasts are here: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

    9 min

  2. 5 DAYS AGO

    Powering the Machine

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com I’m watching amazing video after amazing video made by AI. They’re almost as gripping as the Lowe-Farage blood feud.Hollywood is being “dis-intermediated”, to use the tech lingo. Just as television went from scheduled to on demand, now the content itself is moving that way. Want a different ending to Game of Thrones? Soon you will generate it. And that’s just video. What about everything else? Even if just a fraction of the AI hype actually scales, one thing is certain: we are going to need more electricity More data centres. More compute. More cooling. More fabrication. More automation. Doesn’t matter where you are in the world - Asia, Africa, America, Europe - energy consumption is going to go up. Because that is what humans do. As we evolve, we consume more energy. We also get better at consuming energy. It’s called progress. Despite ESG orthodoxy, wind and solar subsidy and build, and everything else, global oil consumption keeps rising. That’s because it is currently the best form of energy. Cheap energy is the foundation of industrial competitiveness. An economy cannot compete if its energy costs twice as much as its rivals. Despite this inevitability, those in charge of energy policy - and Western Europe is the biggest offender - would have us consume less energy, and make it more expensive. So, because of the idiots, this sector has been starved of investment capital. It’s all summarised here in the bell curve. Even in the US, the sector has been starved of investment. Currently energy represents about 3.3% of the total S&P 500 market value. I know times have changed but in the early 1980s this was above 25%.Here is S&P energy to S&P ratio over the last 25 years. Time to put your capital to work, folks, if you haven’t already. The house view is that oil and gas companies are where gold miners were 18 months ago. Unloved and under-owned, often tightly run, often cash generative and cheap. We’ve been calling for higher energy prices in 2026 and we’ve been rolling investment capital into the sector. Dr John’s timely article early in the new year should be your starting point. Today we go a step further. We’ll explore how to invest in this theme, plus I’ll tell you the three largest oil and gas positions in my own portfolio. I’ve got an exciting small-cap Colombian gas story to tell you about. Exotic. The setup Here is the 5 year chart of Brent Crude. We have seen the spike, the collapse, the rebound and the drift. What matters is that the market has repeatedly found support around $59 (blue line), a level of support which goes back to April 2021 Today we are $67.After a strong January, Brent has eased back, but if you can take a 12 to 18 month view, weakness toward $60 looks more like opportunity to me. On the equity side, XOP, the US oil and gas explorers and producers ETF, has carved out what looks like a massive inverted head-and-shoulders base over the last ten years. It traded near $270 in 2014. Today it’s $145. That is super bullish.

    4 min

  3. 15 FEB

    The AI Shock Is Coming. So Is the Printing.

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com Good Sunday to you, In case you missed them, I put out two articles this week. Here they are. By now I am sure you will have stumbled across Matt Shumer’s essay Something Big Is Happening, which has gone bananas viral. Eighty-one million views on X alone. That’s even more than We’re All Far Right Now. Shumer describes how AI capability is improving exponentially, meaning that most screen-based jobs face imminent and major disruption. By that he means all but disappearing. His advice is blunt: get good at using AI now; assume much of what you do will be automated, and thus your doing it will soon be redundant; and start saving up, there’s economic upheaval coming. It’s perhaps the best articulated essay there is describing this bleak view of what is coming. From my own little vantage point, I’m not nearly so pessimistic. I use AI a lot, and I use it more and more. Its rapid improvement over the last six months has been obvious, though it still cannot recognise humour, let alone write it - humour that’s actually funny, anyway. So it’s rather like the BBC comedy department in that regard. EDIT: Having written that last paragraph, I just watched this. It is a perfect Frat Pack joke. I’ve now watched a load of other clips made with AI movie generator Seed Dance 2.0 from Byte Dance (parent company of TikTok), and I’ve a mind to short Disney first thing on Monday morning. The content is breathtaking, even the comedy. I use AI as a sounding board, for legal and regulatory questions, bureaucratic procedures, personal advice, career and business advice, videos, images. I use it to proof read copy, in the case of PR which I hate writing, I use it to actually generate copy; it helps me with titles, SEO summaries and research. I am not at the point where it writes my articles for me, and I like to think I would not let that happen, but I know others are: I am increasingly reading pieces in respectable broadsheets that are clearly written by bots. That represents a lot of work I might once have given to other people. On the other hand, if I had needed to pay someone proper money to do it, I probably would not have done it at all. In that sense it is not so different from the democratisation of media that followed the turn of the 21st century, when filmmaking, podcasting and publishing suddenly became accessible to anyone with a laptop. From a personal point of view I know I have lost a shedload of voiceover work to AI, and what used to be my main source of income no longer is. More annoying, my voice, with the countless documentaries, promos, trailers and ads I’ve voiced over the years, has been harvested, modelled and copied like mad. Not a lot I can do. But the net result to the world is more content, better content, produced faster and at lower cost. I’m not sure quite how end-of-days it all is. But Shumer’s finger is on the pulse in a way mine is not. Let’s assume he is more right than I am. What then? Two things follow. First, AI is deflationary. Services get cheaper. Productivity rises. Labour loses bargaining power. Second, governments will not sit back and watch demand collapse. If employment and incomes come under pressure, the political response will be fiscal support, especially if it win s elections. This means more borrowing, therefore lower interest rates, and more money-printing. Different routes, same destination: easy money. That is essentially the conclusion reached by analyst Lyn Alden in her latest newsletter, though her reasoning is more technical. The Federal Reserve has already moved from balance sheet reduction back to ongoing expansion. Not a dramatic “QE moment”, but a structural, steady increase to keep the financial plumbing functioning. She calls it the “gradual print”. Jefferies’ Chris Woods, whose Greed & Fear letter I have come to rather like, arrives at a similar place via politics. The US government is now so sensitive to interest costs that sustained tight policy is unrealistic. If markets wobble or growth weakens, intervention returns. Monetary restraint will not survive contact with fiscal reality. Hedge fund billionaire, Ray Dalio’s argument, laid out in his latest offering, is similar, though simpler and colder. The United States is late in a long-term debt cycle, with borrowing rising faster than income. There are three ways out: austerity, default or money printing. The US will choose the third. If foreign buyers will not fund the deficits at acceptable rates, the central bank ultimately does. Different language, same conclusion. Which brings me to an interview I listened to this week, between Grant Williams and Rabobank’s Michael Every. Every thinks stable coins will act as the funding vehicle. Every’s argument is more macro than AI or the Fed. He believes we are seeing a structural shift in the global economic system, comparable to the late Soviet period. With Communism in its final throes, Gorbachev tried to transform the USSR from a military-industrial economy into a consumer one. It failed and the system collapsed. The United States, Every argues, is now attempting the reverse. After decades of financialisation and consumption, it is trying to rebuild industrial and military capacity. That means: industrial policy, trade protection, supply-chain control and capital directed toward production, rather than asset inflation. Instead of buying US treasuries, foreign dollars get recycled into US manufacturing, industry and, yes, its military. This is not the liberal globalisation model of the last thirty years. It is economic statecraft. This means growth may be slower and inflation structurally higher, while financial markets less dominant relative to the real economy. Success is by no means guaranteed, but the direction of travel is toward a more managed, more political, less free market economic system. So … large forces are converging. Different stories, maybe, but the destination is be rather similar. * AI will improve productivity, but lower labour power * Governments will be forced towards fiscal support * No longer independent, central banks will drift towards balance sheet expansion * Geopolitics will drive reindustrialisation and energy demand Which brings us to the question that matters. What are the implications for your money? Where do you put it?

    8 min

  4. 13 FEB

    Bitcoin in a Bear Market: What's Really Going On?

    An extra piece for you this week. I had planned to follow up on Dr John’s timely piece on oil and gas today, but it will have to wait. We need to talk about bitcoin. Since peaking at $126,000 in early October, the bitcoin price has been in freefall, and the declines have accelerated this year. Earlier in the week, it touched $60,000 - declines of over 50% from peak to trough. Today it sits at $67,000. Call it what it is. It’s a bear market. Here’s a 2-year chart so you can see the price action. All the gains of 2025 have been given back and we are back at 2024 levels. Bitcoin has become a software proxy My first observation is that bitcoin’s decline since October has coincided exactly with a brutal selloff in software stocks, even as hard assets - gold, silver, and other metals - have caught one heck of a bid. Just a few years ago, hard assets had no value, it seemed. Forget land, mining, the real economy. It was all about digital, software, IP, trademarks. How things have changed. This chart appeared in a WhatsApp group and I don’t know who made it to give credit, but the story is clear: Bitcoin has become a software proxy and vice versa. The correlation is striking. As concerns around AI have hammered software more generally, bitcoin has followed. Hardware plays within tech have held up Maybe they're next to be hit. That remains to be seen. When the mainstream media calls the bottom - the next wave of bitcoin obituaries The Financial Times, wrong about bitcoin since 2009, came out with its latest stupidity this week claiming that bitcoin is $69,000 overvalued. Yesterday the Daily Mail joined the Retard Gang in telling us bitcoin will go to zero. Remember: just as media frenzy often indicates the peak of a market, so does a media scrum at the bottom. All we need is a high-profile article from the Economist and the lows will be in. I get that some people don’t like bitcoin, and bitcoiners can be obnoxiously vocal when the price is rising, but nocoiners can be just as bad. The amount of people trolling me about bitcoin - cc-ing me into tweets telling me how badly it’s doing, slagging off Michael Saylor, sharing “going to zero” articles - has risen sharply. The more evolved and widespread these narratives, the more people repeating them, the closer we are to an end. On which note, here is a longer-term weekly chart of bitcoin. That weekly RSI is close to all-time lows. Doesn’t mean this is the end. But you get these kinds of sentiment extremes at the end of cycles, not at the beginning. Join this elite readership. Where we go from here This is a bear market. Crypto winter is upon us once again. The trend is down. But the trend will end. It always does. Looking at the above charts, there’s a lot of price memory in the $50-70,000 range. Bitcoin spent much of 2021 and 2024 here. I expect $50,000 - or just below - to hold. I give that a more than 50% probability. But it’s bitcoin. So anything is possible. A typical bitcoin monster correction would see us go all the way back to the 2022 lows at ~$15,000. I don’t see that as likely - especially as the preceding bull market wasn’t that mammoth - maybe 10% probability. It’s also possible the lows are already in, but my gut tells me this bear market has a bit longer to play out. It’s not a short sharp correction like we saw in the spring of last year around the Tariff Tantrum ™, but more of a grinder. Corrections happen in price and time, and I feel this one has a few more twists to it, especially as markets generally are not quite as easy as they were a couple of months ago. My outlook at the beginning of this year was that the S&P 500 would follow the typical trajectory of the second year of a US presidency - and that points to a rocky second and third quarter with a strong final quarter. That has implications for liquidity and sentiment more generally. Bitcoin is the same technological genius creation it always was. It hasn’t changed. Only perception has changed, as it always does. It has been repeatedly demonstrated that bitcoin is a volatile asset that goes to the extremities of both pessimism and optimism, that it is cyclical and that it crucifies hubris. Those cheering the bear market clearly haven’t learned. Instead of celebrating, I urge the skeptical to take advantage of this bear market and use it to learn. On which note, if you’re new to bitcoin, my 2014 book Bitcoin: the Future of Money? is a good place to start. Bitcoin isn’t dead. It’s just going through a bear market. They happen. What’s the story that takes bitcoin higher, then? Remember: narrative follows price. When the price starts rising, all sorts of reasons will get attached and the story will form. Just as now with the price falling, all sorts of bearish narratives have emerged. Quantum Computing is going to end it. Jeffrey Epstein hijacked it. The core devs have fallen out. Strategy (NASDAQ.MSTR) is going bust. Whatever. It doesn’t matter what the story is. That will come. Price leads. Quantum BS When you go to a bitcoin conference, one thing that’s notable is just how intelligent, educated, informed and ambitious the participants are. There is not the proliferation of midwits that you might find on, for example, the FT payroll. The bitcoin community is super bright. Do you think those involved haven’t thought about and prepared for Quantum computing and the threats it may or may not present? Of course they have. Is bitcoin more likely to be ready to deal with the quantum computing threat than say SWIFT, the BBC, the NHS, or some bank? And which is likely to cope with it better - a sector crammed full of genius computer scientists with their own capital at stake, or some institution run by a government? If you actually had a computer capable of taking down bitcoin, there are much easier, more satisfying things to take out, such as the House of Commons email server. Way more important than the actual threat of quantum computing is the perception of what that threat is, even if that perception is bogus. But, as I say, perceptions change, just as bull and bear market cycles do, and so will this narrative die except among the most ardent nocoiners. Of course I would rather bitcoin was at $150,000. But I am not worried. I won’t like it if bitcoin goes to $50,000. I’ll like it even less if it goes to $15,000. But we have been here before, and we’ll likely be here again. We know how this story ends. A prediction for the record Here it is: It may have to go lower first, but bitcoin will outperform precious metals over the next 18 months, and probably over the next 12. Let’s mark the price: gold is $5,000. Silver is $78. Bitcoin is $67,000. By the way, I advocate owning both: gold and bitcoin. So at this point I should really plug Charlie Morris’s BOLD, an ETF you can buy through your broker which owns both gold and bitcoin. Until next time, Dominic Bitcoin: the Future of Money? by Dominic Frisby is available at all good bookstores. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

    8 min

  5. 8 FEB

    Take It With a Pinch of Salt

    I can’t tell you how many messages I am getting from people about silver. Have I seen this video, read this article, looked at this data, listened to this podcast. JP Morgan is about to go bust, the paper markets are overwhelmed, the price is manipulated, China is setting the real price, this is a reset. And so on. The problem with speculative manias, especially when silver is involved, is that enormous amounts of misinformation get spread, much of it about things you and I, as ordinary investors, can do nothing about. Take it all with a pinch of salt is my advice. What I find interesting is that similar amounts of misinformation are being spread about bitcoin. The price is being manipulated on the futures markets, Strategy is about to go bust, Michael Saylor is this, that and the other, and so on. It’s game over. The only real difference is that one is in a bull market, which may or may not be over, and the other is in a bear market, which may or may not be over. Sentiment for both is at extremes, albeit at different ends of the investment spectrum. During every crypto winter I’ve known, people start to give up on it. The future is no longer what it once was. The tech is flawed. It’s going to zero. It’s not real. It’s a scam invented by the CIA, Jeffrey Epstein, Elon Musk, take your pick. Again, take it all with a pinch of salt. Remember, neither situation is permanent. There is a case for owning both, and I do in my portfolio. I’d rather bitcoin was $150,000 and more, of course I would. But I’ll take a sportsman’s bet that, from current levels over the next 12 months, bitcoin will outperform gold, and probably silver. I know some readers prefer tangible precious metals. Others prefer bitcoin. Both points of view are fine. Each to their own. But I’m an own-both guy. Over the past six months the disappointment in bitcoin has been more than offset by the gains in precious metals. In previous years the reverse has been true, and the reverse will be true again. With the extraordinary accumulation of gold by central banks, the rising price, Triffin’s Dilemma, and de-dollarisation, I do think it is possible some kind of reset is coming as far as gold is concerned. The price does need to go much higher for it to overtake the dollar as central banks’ primary reserve asset. It has already overtaken US Treasuries. But that does not mean silver is going to be remonetised. Silver’s monetary role was always as a medium of exchange, and we now live in a world where exchange is almost entirely digital. Yes, I would prefer to be paid in physical silver. There is something quite spiritual about being paid for a job in physical silver. But so what. Convenience wins. Silver’s role as a store of wealth was minimal. That is where gold still has use. Yes, silver has umpteen industrial uses. It is a critical metal and in short supply. A rising gold price will carry silver higher too, just as it has platinum in recent months. But I don’t buy the monetary reset arguments as far as silver is concerned. I do get them about gold though. Anyway, good Sunday to you. This week I appeared on Geoff Norcott’s podcast. If you fancy a watch or a listen, here are links to Spotify and Apple podcasts. If you live in a third world country such as the UK, I urge you to own gold or silver. The pound will be further devalued, as will the euro and dollar. The bullion dealer I recommend, whereever you are int he world, is The Pure Gold Company. More here. ICYMI here is this week’s commentary This coming week I’ll be looking at the tax loss trades and I am aiming to have more on oil as well. Until next time Dominic This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

    5 min

  6. 4 FEB

    A Bull Market Flush – and a Management Red Flag

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com Phew. I need to write about something else apart from silver and gold. But I have to look at the price action we have seen this week, and I will say this. It was violent. Extraordinary, even. But it wasn’t necessarily bearish. Sharp sell-offs like those we saw on Friday and Monday are characteristic of bull markets. In bear markets, corrections are grinding and protracted. Selling pressure is persistent. Value erodes slowly amid deteriorating fundamentals. Bull markets behave differently. They flush. Explosively. Late entrants and overleveraged speculators get shaken out. Stops are tight. Everyone is climbing the wall of worry. When a correction comes, a cascade of stop losses gets triggered all at once. Hence the violence. BTW the latest Atlas Pulse came out on Friday, as level-headed as always. It’s the best gold and silver newsletter out there, in my view. Get your copy here - it’s free. This is not just a precious-metals phenomenon. It’s a broader market truism. I’ve seen it in equities, other commodities, you get it all the time in tech - especially bitcoin. Indeed the action we are seeing in bitcoin at the moment is typical of a bear market. The selling is grinding and relentless, rather than sharp and explosive. What’s more the gold and silver miners behaved well, and in a way that is consistent with a bull market flush. Yes, they saw significant selling. But gold corrected 21% and silver 41%. GDX (the large mining companies) only corrected 19% and SIL (the large silvers) 24%. Most importantly, they recovered faster. You would not have got a bounce like that in a bear market. The relative strength is telling. If this were a reversal, the miners would have sold off by more. They didn’t. If you live in a third world country such as the UK, I urge you to own gold or silver. The pound will be further devalued, as will the euro and dollar. The bullion dealer I recommend is The Pure Gold Company. More here. What’s more, theh miners only need $4,000 gold and $50 silver to be highly profitable. But if higher prices are the new normal, then a lot of previously uneconomic mines - particularly the low-grade, bulk-tonnage in Canada - are going to become economic. Heck, even STLLR Gold (TSX.STLR) might work. I should probably delete that last sentence. How the landscape has changed from a couple of years ago. Such huge potential, but … In other news, I sat through the Comstock Inc (AMEX:LODE) conference call yesterday. An hour of my life I won’t get back. The asymmetric potential of this company remains enormous. But that call was a red flag bonanza. With the silver story what it is, and a clear path for this company to become North America’s largest silver producer, this stock should be trading above $15.

    4 min

  7. 28 JAN

    Genius or Madman?

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com I am rotating some of my gold and silver profits into oil and gas, as I think energy is next. I will have more on this very soon. I promise. But we need to talk gold and silver today, plus we have an update on top pick Metals Exploration (MTL.L) I thought Monday was the top. Silver went from $100/oz to $115/oz over the weekend and then on Monday in US hours reversed and gave back all those gains. It looked like we were shaping up for an island reversal. Here we are on Wednesday and, as I write, we are at $115 again. This is one strong market. If you live in a third world country such as the UK, I urge you to own gold or silver. The pound will be further devalued. The bullion dealer I recommend is The Pure Gold Company. Pricing is competitive, quality of service is high. They deliver to the UK, the US, Canada and Europe or you can store your gold with them. More here. Let’s all do the Randolph? I have a friend. We’ll call him Randolph (which I read means “”wolf shield” - cool, huh?). He’s about 30 and he works in the City, as a quant analyst or something. After some extensive research, a few months back he put 95% of his entire portfolio into a silver mining company by the name of Hycroft Mining (NASDAQ.HYMC). It was $5. Bear in mind, he has no real estate, so to put 95% of his entire portfolio into something can’t be that far off 95% of his entire net worth. The research he’d done into both silver and, specifically, into the situation that was Hycroft, and the trust he had in his own judgment, gave him the conviction he needed to go for it. Today the stock is trading at $50. He’s 10xd his money. Randolph was talking to me about the company in December when it was $13. I resisted. I got so many ideas thrown at me, I can’t buy them all and I already had my silver exposure via Sierra Madre (SM.V) which was going and continues to go great guns. (It has almost tripled since December so it’s not like I can complain). But you always hear about the ones you should have bought. The ones you were tipped that then collapsed - they get forgotten very quickly. So good for Randolph. Events have proved him right. You’ve got to be in it, to win it, and all that. But what if events had gone against him? What if silver had turned down 30%? He’d have been up the proverbial, and some. But it didn’t and he’s been proved right. My buddy Simon Catt, by the way, who was in Hycroft even before Randolph, thinks Hycroft can go up another 10x from here. He could be right. I am just too cautious about buying things that have moved this much. Maybe I shouldn’t be. I didn’t buy bitcoin at $10 because it had just 10xd. But, as I say, you only remember the ones that went up.The price is always there to remind you and eat away at you. The ones you didn’t buy that collapsed - the gazillion of shitcoins and shitcos I’ve avoided over the years - I’ve no idea what they even are. I should put them all on a spreadsheet, calculate how much I’ve saved by avoiding them and use the money I haven’t lost to buy myself a new frock. I don’t advocate doing what Randolph did because there is so much that can go wrong. When it does go wrong, the person who advocated it will get the blame as much as the person who actually did it. More importantly, it’s a poor way to manage risk But I’ve done something similar myself. And ballsy bets can and do work - when you get them right. But they are better done when young I’d say. If they do go wrong, you still have plenty of time to recover. My mate Swen Lorentz, who writes the exemplary Undervalued Shares says he sees it among his readers. “Many went from 10k to 100k and then from 100k to 1m with ballsy bets. Thereafter things can become more normal.” The problem is when you ‘re wrong. Position sizing - especially when using leverage - is everything. Charlie Morris’s monthly gold report, Atlas Pulse is, in my view, the best gold newsletter out there. Get your copy here. No pay nada. Where you need to be with silver right now With all the above in mind, here is where I think you need to be with silver. The easy money has been made. In the miners and leveraged silver plays, the asymmetry is no longer what it was.Yes, I can see a bananas scenario in which the calls of the most ardent silver bulls prove true and silver goes to $300/oz or even $700/oz. Unlikely, though possible. In such a scenario, Hycroft and Sierra Madre and many other silver miners besides will be 10 baggers and more, even from today’s prices. But silver could just as easily top at $125, and go back to $25.The more elevated a price gets the more vulnerable that market becomes. It’s only a month ago that silver was $50 and that felt high. Many will feel differently and want to be all in. Animal spirits and all that. But Auntie Dominic says you should be in a position with speculative silver plays, where you now have your original investment off the table, and have banked some profit. The rest you can let run, in case those higher prices do actually come into play. Every time we feel at a point of extremity take a little bit more off the table. But you do not want to be in a state where this winning position could still turn into a loss. There is a bullet-proof vest available to you. You may as well put it on. We need to look at Metals Exploration (MTL.L)

    6 min
  8. $100 silver, $5,000 gold (almost). Wow.

    25 JAN

    $100 silver, $5,000 gold (almost). Wow.

    With all sorts of rumours about physical shortages of silver, for your Sunday thought piece today, I spoke to precious metals dealer Joshua Saul to try and find out what is really happening in the metals markets. Joshua Saul has been dealing gold and silver bullion for 20 years. He’s never seen anything like what’s happening now. His key points: silver is catching up from decades of undervaluation. The gold-silver ratio historically sat at 15:1. In recent years it hit 100:1. That’s not a price quirk - it’s a structural anomaly that’s now correcting. Supply can't keep up. Most silver comes as a byproduct of other mining, so production can't respond quickly to price spikes. Industrial demand is surging (solar, EVs, data centres). Mints are sold out. China's quietly accumulating. Physical premiums are spiking globally The Pure Gold Company has metal, but only because they have large contractual commitments with the Royal Mint, but he’s clear - this is unprecedented. Even 2008 didn’t look like this. Find out more about the Pure Gold Company, here. NB: I was trying out a new camera and I know it looks crap. Won’t happen again. Meanwhile, ICYMI, here is this week’s commentary. Until next time, Dominic PS Let me give my buddy Charlie a plug. His monthly gold report, Atlas Pulse is, in my view, the best gold newsletter out there. Get your copy here. No pay nada. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

    32 min
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Readings of brilliant articles from the Flying Frisby. Occasional super-fascinating interviews. Market commentary, investment ideas, alternative health, some social commentary and more, all with a massive libertarian bias. www.theflyingfrisby.com

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