What is going on today? - Megathread

Investing and Markets 📈
3394

Q2 2023:

• Strange period as every company today is trying to sell you gold rather than buy your gold from you. Seems like the trade here is profiting off-of high metals premiums. Vastly different from 2009-2011.

• If you & your partner earn £40,000pa & £20,000pa you’d likely qualify for a £250,000 property (maybe a little more). Yet at these interest rates you’d struggle month to month and £250k barely gets you an apartment in the southeast.

• Inflation in the US has come down but if you reduce interest rates the price gauging will spike inflation again due to lack of overall supply of desirable things.

• Petrol is still significantly too expensive for many commuters in the UK. Inflation in the UK has simply demolished real purchasing power for working & middle incomes. The reality of that will show over the next 6 months and into Q3 2024.

• The yield curve is inverted. Look to see what happens AFTER it corrects.

• The UK shows no sign of lowering spending in accordance to GDP or at the very least homing in on spending and getting the most talented to spend wisely for the benefit of the country’s working people who would kinda REALLY like to be asset owners themselves sooner rather than later when they double in price again.

There seems to be a buying opportunity in the making although nobody quite knows what in? Or if they do they are staying quiet and watching closely.

I would say that before Q1 2025 the smart money would have found the opportunities and been buying heavily. It’ll have something to do with interest rates, perfectly sized & located real estate and a strong equity value-fund manager who noticed the buying opportunity in accordance with currencies & interest rates.

Inflation slowing is fine, what happens after the dust settles? The majority of the western countries populations will have lost all purchasing power by then.

Before 2025 something noticeably large will happen to do with loaning money and interest rates and inflation. Vague prediction I know though I believe it’s likely a large amount of deposited cash will move as more and more are shown how to do that, not too sure the outcome of this on asset prices but something is brewing.

Going by the gold price (aside from the obvious brics situation), I’m guessing the majority of smart money already anticipated the movement of cash out of banks over the next year once it moves mainstream and your lower average saver even moves from cash to CSH2 or physical gold, causing a large issue for banks.

Seems like gold is the smartest play as the inevitable money printing devaluing the cash will likely benefit the gold demand and keep it high for many years.

I do not like the medium-term outcome of saying this though I believe 2023/25 will see:

• RENTAL PRICES GROWING, as young people trying to buy houses will be forced into apartments with an inevitable government subsidy in some way.
• GROWTH STOCKS CORRECTING, to adjust to lower sales and high interest rates.
• SOLID VALUE STOCKS HOLDING STRONG.
• COMMERCIAL PROPERTY CONVERTED into apartments.
• A LARGE ISSUE WITH LOANS, INTEREST RATES AND CASH MOVING INTO CASH FUNDS & GOLD.

Prove me wrong?

3 Likes
3395

What is the cheapest way to invest in gold through FT? Any recommendations?

3396

Gold ETFs

3397

Yeah gold ETF/ETC probably. There’s a few good ETCs

£RMAP
£SGLN

These are probably the more well known two there are others. RMAP is interesting in that you should be able to go to Cardiff and get your physical gold from the royal mint if you wanted. Though how practical that is I don’t know

4 Likes
3398

I was debating SGLN and RMAP. In the end I went with SGLN because of the lower costs 0.12% vs 0.25%.

3 Likes
3399

They want your dollars.

3400

Another great compilation here, particularly the podcasts on value investing and where to hold cash for higher returns:

1 Like
3401

Screenshot_20230415_085112_Facebook
Screenshot_20230415_085112_Facebook1080×1113 158 KB

5 Likes
3402

UK inflation ticking down slightly but still at double figure 10.1% actual vs 9.8% expected.

image
image1170×1028 106 KB

image
image1170×986 102 KB

image
image1170×1093 110 KB

2 Likes
3403

Hardly especially compared to EU and US. Main drivers in poor productivity, healthcare and energy policy + Brexit aren’t letting up anytime soon so I can’t see much progress being made without a colossal recession.

5 Likes
3404

Those Y scales need to be the same to visualise the true extent of the mess in the UK

1 Like
3405

Screenshot_20230419_183220_Facebook
Screenshot_20230419_183220_Facebook1042×1068 190 KB

1 Like
3406

After 2016 - 2020 the true extent of the UK’s issues are quite literally 50 years of tough change. If you were to look inside the finances of Britain’s top 5% you’ll surely see gold purchases throughout 2017/18/19/20 and then the smartest of the top 5% buying gold throughout 2022/23.

The UK is screwed in terms of equality & lifestyle for the many going forward as far as the eyes can imagine. At least 50 years.

You actually still hear people today saying ‘oh it’ll be alright in a while’ or ‘it’ll sort itself out’…

Have you seen how the British public drive on a 4-lane smart motorway? THATS THE STANDARD OF IT ‘SORTING ITSELF OUT.’

It would take a colossal effort of advanced education both on & off the job to an incredible amount of people in Britain and for the leaders and entrepreneurs to dedicate immense amounts of their lives to bringing about the standard of business & talent required to turn the UK into an absolute powerhouse of productivity and lifestyle equality.

You are physically talking 30-50 years of efforts.

You’d need the roads to work and people to spend a maximum of 30 minutes to get to work instead of that wasted productivity commute time of 2-3 hours traffic each day.

You would need intentional people knowing exactly the direction of talented work practices and to absolutely push forward whatever skill they have into the stratosphere.

You would need the British public to place personal finance aside for a decade or so and focus almost solely on talent and achieving physical business success, productivity success.

Not this talking BS. So many people just talking as their job. It’s actually immense how many millions of people are just waking up and talking. Like really, it’s so unproductive.

Drain government, drain the public sector leeches, teach better skills to school age children and create enough actual solid opportunities for these teens so they do not leave school then waste 5 years in their bedrooms writing cover letters to cv library job positions.

The UK has entered a TOUGH decade or two.

You can’t produce anything positive sitting in 1-3 hours traffic each day. Wasted time. Government need to fix this by next year. You simply can not continue in the UK like this.

7 Likes
3407

Im away to fill my bunker with tinned pilchards.

3 Likes
3408

:rofl::joy::rofl::joy:

3409

Party at Bob1’s

1 Like
3410

Brexit was supposed to see Britain as the next Singapore. I wonder how that’s working out :thinking:

4 Likes
3411

Fresh batch of podcasts, videos and reads:

2 Likes
3412

Anyone else hearing that hundreds (or a few thousand) British people are trying to sue their mortgage advisor because when they took out their mortgage in 2020, 2021 at the lowest interest rate in history and only fixed for 2 years.

Omg.

How could you not make a decision for yourself having taking one look at the previous 12-13 years of the lowest interest rates. Surely your brain would realise rates will be entering a rising period sooner rather than later.

I think some papers are picking up on this.

At 1.5% mortgage rates or anything under 2.5% you’d fix for 10-max years. What did they think with their 1.80% rate, ‘better not fix it could go to 1.50%’…

3 Likes
3413

In hindsight it was just free money. But I remember at the time there was speculation that rates could go negative, as they did for some bonds and current accounts in Europe.

1 Like