Mining is a very difficult business. As an investor, it is even tougher. Most mining companies trade at roughly fair value. Even the cheap ones are rarely cheap enough to interest me. The thing about mining is that when something goes wrong, you can lose everything. To compensate for this risk, I only want mining plays with five-fold upside or better based on current Read More

  Got Gold? I’m in Invercargill, the southern tip of South Island, New Zealand. I have one week to go before finally heading home. I want to see as much as I can. I’m supposed to be escaping the next data point. However, I cannot escape the fact that there’s a tempest brewing and it’s about to make landfall. The Euro is imploding. Despite protests Read More

I’m sitting here watching CNBC fill airtime with stories of how Goldman Sachs created securities that were designed to fail. We are supposed to feel sorry for the wealthy and financially savvy institutional investors who bought these things without doing their due diligence. This was a closed game that only a few very large investors were even invited to participate in. If you don’t Read More

I recently wrote about gearing. Some industries really lend themselves to gearing. Let’s see how that works in practice. One of my best investments of all time was US Global Investors (GROW: Nasdaq). US Global is the manager of various mutual funds with a particular focus on Eastern Europe and natural resources—both sectors that I am optimistic about. In the asset management business, as assets Read More

I normally invest in companies, but occasionally, something sets up just right for what I’ll call a trade. A trade is an investment that is intended to last from a few days to a few months depending on various conditions. Basically, this is an investment with a near term catalyst. The goal is to buy shares right away, average down if it goes against Read More

Which business am I? Would you be long or short? In 2009, I had 2.1 trillion of revenue and 3.5 trillion of expenses, for an operating loss of 1.4 trillion. For 2010, I’m predicting a small increase in revenues to 2.2 trillion while expenses stay roughly constant at 3.5 trillion. Through heroic efforts, losses will be staunched to only 1.3 trillion this year. I Read More

Gold is going higher, but it’s hard to find an intelligent way to gain leverage to it. Sure you can own gold, but if it more than triples from here in the next five years, I’ll be shocked. You can buy the producers, but they all have warts. Either they’re overvalued, they keep diluting investors, their mines are in countries that you’d be scared Read More

We owned shares in Oceana Gold, (OGC: Canada). They had stable yet depleted mining assets in New Zealand that were clearly worth more than the whole company. They also had acquired a gold property in the Philippines named Didipio. Didipio, once built, was going to take the company to the next level. We were enamored with it, but it was going to cost AUD$154 Read More

By now, you know that I like get to know management. When investing in smaller companies, you are really just investing in people. When you are risking your own money, you can never know enough. There’s nothing like alcohol to ferret out the truth. I was at an industry conference to learn more about a company that I owned a small position in. The Read More