Rory Gillen's Blog

It’s been a tough bear market for the gold and silver miners. The Philadelphia Gold & Silver Miners Index (XAU) reached a weekly high in April 2011 (225.79) and declined some 64% peak to trough by December 2013 (weekly low 80.43).

Sometimes you can have your cake and eat it! In investing that means buying stocks with good defensive growth characteristics. In May 2010, GillenMarkets introduced the US Global Defensive Consumer Franchise Theme for subscribers and the theme included...

If it looks like risk, feels like risk and acts like risk, it is natural to conclude that it is risk. But in turbulent times, such as now, investors must remind themselves that volatility is not the same as risk.The stock markets are nothing more than a collection of businesses and risk is highest in individual companies and can be categorised as follows;
The business risk , The financial risk and The valuation risk

The recovery in global stock markets, which started in mid March 2009, is just over two years old. Many commentators feel that the recovery is illusory, based on cheap money from central banks and reckless fiscal spending by governments desperate to stave off recession and rising unemployment. Others see an improving global economy with the emerging markets as the new locomotive of world growth underpinned by rising populations, the urbanisation of China and India in particular and the consequent growth in emerging economy middle class incomes, which has brought some two billion consumers into the global economy.

I have outlined my views regarding why I believe Irish government prices have most likely bottomed and that potentially attractive value is on offer.

The gold bull market, which started from a low of $255 an ounce in early 2001, looks as strong as ever after hitting a new high price of $1,420 an ounce in late December last. In the initial years, gold’s rise had more to do with it being a cheap asset following a 20-year bear market through the 1980s and 1990s. More lately, its strength reflects deep-seated investor concerns regarding ongoing global monetary instability which has been created by persistent global trade imbalances, quantitative easing and the intervention by central banks to weaken their own currencies, of which Japan is the latest example.

If earnings from the US global consumer franchise stocks are as reliable as the income from a government bond, and they have been in the past, then surely the value now lies with these stocks and not with the bonds.