Websites offer nuggets of advice
Rob Carrick
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Precious little is what most investors know about the mysteries of what drives gold prices.
Still, you can make huge money in gold if you buy and sell strategically. Gold prices are up about 18 per cent from their 12-month low, but they've retreated almost 5 per cent this month. Is now a good time to buy in?
Glad you asked, because the Personal Finance column has rounded up a group of websites if you're interested in gold (and other investing subjects, too).
We start with the website of the bullion dealer Kitco at kitco.com, where you'll find "live" charts showing the price trend of gold and other metals for the current day and the previous two days. If you want a longer-term picture, there are charts for the previous 30-day through 10-year periods, and a historical database that lets you look up prices and charts for any day of the year going back to 1999. The one-year chart tells us that gold peaked at $691.40 (U.S.) an ounce last month and has recently traded in the $660 range.
Kitco is also home to online discussions on gold and such other precious metals as silver, platinum and palladium (you'll find base metals covered at kitcometals.com), and there's a listing of current news stories about gold from sources around the world.
One other nugget on this site: daily gold market commentary from several investment dealers, including Scotia Capital.
Gold is not the sort of thing you invest in and then forget about like, say a bank stock or Government of Canada bond. You have to keep on top of things by monitoring not only pricing trends but also the sort of broader market trends that can be tracked using the daily blog briefs from a website called InvesLogic at inveslogic.com.
You can sign up for daily e-mails that include news stories and links to blog postings on a wide variety of topics, including gold, China, clean energy, exchange-traded funds and uranium.
There are no guarantees the blog postings are written by people worth reading, so think of this commentary as food for thought more than definitive analysis.
Recent gold-related offerings contained in InvesLogic e-mails included a posting that suggested more down side for gold before a push higher to $800 by year's end.
"It might be prudent to have cash available to take advantage of what might be the last buying opportunity of 2007," said the posting by the gold-focused blogger Jason Hamlin.
There are lots of investing forums on the Internet - Yahoo Finance (finance.yahoo.com), Silicon Investor (siliconinvestor.com) and TheLion.com are some good examples - but they're populated by blowhard know-nothings as well as serious investors.
The idea of the new BuildingWealth.ValueForum.com website is to keep things exclusive by charging an annual fee of $220 (U.S.).
Gordon Pape, the ever-popular investment writer, created this website as a portal for Canadian investors to ValueForum.com, a U.S. operation that has built a reputation as a place where serious investors exchange ideas. Clients of Mr. Pape's newsletters get a discount on the membership price.
It happens that the gold discussion on BuildingWealth.ValueForum.com is one of the most active on the site. Topics range from individual gold stocks to the broad sector. By the way, there are discussions on lots of other Canada-focused topics on this website (there's lots of chatter about income trusts), and you have access to the U.S. ValueForum site as well.
Gold is also a popular topic on blogs, which are online commentaries written by anyone with something to say. There's a gold section on the blogging site SeekingAlpha (gold.seekingalpha.com), and on the website maintained by the Canadian investment industry veteran Bill Cara.
Mr. Cara's site at billcara.com offers commentary on a wide variety of topics that range from gold to exchange-traded funds, technical and fundamental stock analysis and his own Cara 100 list of outstanding stocks.
There's a good primer on gold investing on Mr. Cara's site, with a highlight being this comment: "I learned a long time ago that there is some truth to the saying that a gold mine is a hole in the ground with a liar on top." There is also a long list of blog entries focusing on both gold and gold mining stocks.
A handy little place to research any interesting stocks you find on these websites is Instant Bull (instantbull.com), which is one of those websites that finds interesting bits about your company on other websites.
Instant Bull is best used on U.S. stocks, but it's a great time saver if you want to know what's being said about a stock in the world of blogs and investing forums. As a time saver, this site is gold.
rcarrick@globeandmail.com |
