The Internet is full of gold gurus who will happily predict the future today and promptly forget their predictions tomorrow
Bullion.Directory precious metals analysis 4 December, 2014
By Terry Kinder
Investor, Technical Analyst
What the Internet needs is a few more gold gurus, someone who can tell you with certainty what will happen tomorrow.
There is actually a pretty funny blog post about this titled Gold blog writing for fun and profit. The first paragraph of the post is classic:
I have been receiving a lot of emails from you my customers of the Gold Blog Advisors “Pumping for Profits”(tm)system. I hear your pain. There is no doubt that this prolonged gold bear market and recent break of $1180 has finally caused a lot of your readers to actually question your content.
You have to hate it when reality intrudes upon a good narrative.
Why I’ll never be one of the gold gurus: My crystal ball is broken and in the shop this week (and every week). Image: pixabay
Then there are the memes. See if these sound familiar:
China – you really can’t go wrong with anything on China and how much gold they are buying, the punters love it.
Paper-physical disconnect – this one should still work even though coin premiums are low, just pick some silly price on eBay to contrast to spot or spin it that there are physical deals being done under the counter at much higher prices. Selective highlighting of online stores being out of stock can also support this meme.
Blame it on manipulation – this is a great standby if you were silly enough to not make a generalised claim about price and got too time or figure specific.
The post continues:
With your memes also remember that academics have shown that it is better to be confident than correct as “pundits get a better audience through confidence and the excitement it generates”. Also lets not forget the great work of Stephan Lewandowsky on misinformation:
“People love sensational stories. They like to pass on tales that make the listener very happy, disgusted or afraid: anything that provokes a strong emotional response. Neutral stories, which are probably more likely to be true, but much more boring, therefore get short shrift.”
But, I think one of my favorite parts of the whole post on gold gurus is the word cloud of hyperbole from King World News –
If you’re going to cry wolf over and over again, you better have a good headline and the above is like a master class of zombie apocalypse attention grabbing headlines for aspiring gold gurus.
Ah, then there are the gold gurus themselves. I’m not sure if there is a certification for this designation or if you just need to be certifiable, but let’s just pick on two of the latest gold “guru-riffic” predictions because these will either be brilliant or terribly embarrassing.
1. Harvey Organ:
- $200.00 silver by end of 2014
- $10,000.00 – $12,000.00 gold by end of 2014
- $140.00 – $150.00 oil end of 2014
2. Bo Polny:
- $2,000.00 gold by end of 2014
- Silver to retest highs in 2014
- $10,000.00 gold by 2020 – 2021
Now, December isn’t over yet, so Organ and Polny could yet be proven correct. However, it doesn’t seem very probable that gold will visit $2,000.00 or above, or that silver will retest the 2011 highs by the end of this month.
Of the two gold gurus, I find what Polny has to say more interesting, if nothing else because it sounds like something W.D. Gann might have said, especially the part about time and price. Having said that, at the same time it also sounds a bit like gibberish.
In the end, I suppose, it is better for gold gurus to sound confident rather than be correct. At least I think that’s right. Guess that’s why I’ll never be a certified or certifiable member of the gold gurus club.
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Made me laugh thank you.
Gurus are always selling something and they roll out these crazy figures to help their agenda, giving us gold bugs a bad name by association.
Question their wildly wrong guesses and the answer is usually to blame manipulation by Unseen Forces.
Yes, I think some gold gurus simply go too far in their predictions. While it is understandable to want to “spice up” their predictions, the repeated calls for $10,000.00 + gold or $100.00, $200.00+ or even higher silver, when gold and silver sit below $1,200.00 and $17.00 respectively look ridiculous and premature to me at this point.
I do believe gold and silver will move much higher over time. There probably does come a day when government debt and deficits, huge bubbles in the economy, and the assumption of too much personal debt begin to weigh on the economy and make gold and silver much more appealing to the “common man”. I’m not clever enough to know when that day will be. I already had my round of attempting to predict the price of silver and failed miserable, so I don’t see myself attempting another guess anytime soon. I have been much better at guessing when to get out rather than when to get in.
Apparently there is something to the idea that if you shout loud enough, even if you are wrong, that a certain number of people will listen and follow you come what may. I’m not very good at yelling and screaming for attention, so I’ll likely never be anybody’s personal gold guru. Anyhow, I would rather not be. I would prefer to look at precious metals rationally. They are an essential part of a well balanced portfolio to include cash, stocks, treasuries and precious metals. I like the idea of Harry Browne’s Permanent Portfolio and think it still make a good deal of sense. It’s difficult, nearly but not quite impossible, to predict which way prices are heading with a high degree of reliability, so it makes much more sense to prepare yourself for any eventual outcome, periodically re-balancing your portfolio as needed. Gurus may recommend this as well, but it’s harder to take them seriously when some of them also call for prices which are multiple-times higher than current prices.
In other words, some gurus are talking out of both sides of their mouths, which makes me not want to listen to them.