Every few days or so I get a question from someone about purchasing physical gold. Randall Oliphant of Barrick Gold recently said in an interview that most new gold production goes into the jewellery market, predominantly in India, and talked about the gold business benefiting from a jewellery marketing campaign. …

Market commentary Gold is now sitting at a 2 year high and things have never looked more golden. Marshall McLuhan said “The medium is the message.” Many commentators overlook an extremely important factor in today’s market reality and that is getting your message out – not so much the content …

The Gold Share Market Entering a Second Phase In the past week the Canadian national newspaper, the National Post, had a special insert on Mutual Funds: the Precious Metals Fund category average one-year return as of March 31st was 68.49%, the highest of any mutual fund category. Under the caption …

Market commentary What a week it has been! There have been numerous reports for the last two weeks of the Japanese piling into the yellow metal, in advance of the March 31st cap on bank deposit insurance. Those who watched ABC Evening News in the USA tonight were treated to …

Report from Vancouver (Part 1) We just attended the Vancouver Investment Conference in beautiful British Columbia, which was timed to finish just as the British Columbia and Yukon Chamber of Mines Conference started, in the elegant setting of the Hotel Vancouver. The turnout for the two-day investment event was not …

“Now they are talking about this new currency the argentino. You might as well take a newspaper and cut it up into little pieces of paper and call that money.” – Susana Diegas, Buenos Aires housewife, about the stillborn Argentinian currency – the Argentino. Predictions for 2002 It’s traditional to …

Well it’s December 23rd and we’ve shut the books on 2001. We’d like to take the opportunity to thank all of our readers for support and encouragement over the last few months. “Straight Talk” is now read in 23 different countries. Next year we’ll be bigger and better. All the …

I have had a great deal of feedback from my “Silver” essays. Please keep it coming! Other snippets to report: I mentioned that by-product silver production from some porphyry copper mines is huge, not because they contain high grade silver, but because they mine huge volumes of low grade rock …

“Mining is the backbone of wealth and the spinal column of all certainty.” – Cecil John Rhodes Silver, like gold, platinum, and palladium is considered one of the precious metals. This differentiates it from zinc, copper, lead, nickel and tin which are base metals. What makes a precious metal “precious”? …

Market Commentary: They call it “convergence” in advertising. The CNN-AOL-Time Warner machine blitzkrieged us with unrelenting, shameless, in-your-face, blatant, HYPE; contriving and conspiring to fashion something as inconsequential as the opening of a kid’s movie – Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Philosophers’ Stone in UK) – into not just …