The most important decision an investor can make is what to use as the numeraire. But few investors even know what a numeraire is let alone have put deliberate thought into choosing their numeraire.  With advances in technology using a reliable numeraire is easier than ever.
CAPITAL ACCUMULATION
Investing is the process of allocating capital. [...]

United States legal tender nickels present an almost completely risk-free investment.  Getting a large 5 gallon bucket and tossing in the nickels from your daily change is an excellent way to preserve your purchasing power, protect your wealth and reduce both counter-party and payment risk.  But due to increasingly despotic threats and actions by the [...]

Humans eat or humans die and with the Peak Oil specter looming this issue is becoming very pressing for about 923,000,000 people.  The Internet is an amazing series of tubes.  A friend told me that Nate Hagens, MBA, former Managing Director at Salomon Brothers, Lehman Brothers and editor of The Oil Drum, used my liquidity [...]

THE FAR EAST
China is a completely different world and the way of doing business there clashes with traditional Western practices.  If the West’s great contribution to humanity was the rule of law then the East’s great contribution is bureaucracy.  This method for allocating capital does have some advantages but that hardly means it is done [...]

Gold is the primary tangible monetary asset because of the large above ground stockpiles.  It is primarily produced to be hoarded not consumed.  The other quasi-monetary commodities are silver, platinum, palladium and copper.  The role of the precious metals will be markedly different in the Information Age than during the Industrial Age.
WHAT IS PLATINUM
Platinum is [...]

FUTURES AND FORWARD CONTRACTS
Many commodities trade via forward or futures contracts.  A forward contract is is an agreement between two parties to buy or sell an asset at a specified point of time in the future.  A futures contract is a standardized contract to buy or sell a specified commodity of standardized quality at a certain [...]

Decades ago Ludwig von Mises wrote in The Theory of Money and Credit,
It is impossible to grasp the meaning of the idea of sound money if one does not realize that it was devised as an instrument for the protection of civil liberties against despotic inroads on the part of governments.  Ideologically it belongs in the same class with [...]

BRAZIL IS MONSTEROUS
Brazil with 3,285,618 square miles (8,511,965 square kilometers) and around 200 million people is the fifth largest country in the world and about 11% larger than country-continent Australia. With 5 World Cup wins Brazil leads the board ahead of Italy with their four wins and a purported 2,451.8 tons of gold and Germany with [...]

Had a call today from a lady advising me that I would be getting a call in a couple a days from a “Commodity Advisor” with information about the gold market. She stressed that she wasn’t selling anything. When I asked where she was from and she replied Hong Kong I knew it was a [...]

COMPETING PARADIGMS
During an interview with Contrary Investors Cafe on 24 February 2009 I discussed both gold backwardation and silver backwardation.  After the interview I was asked why more commentators are not discussing this issue.  I do not know.
Regarding money there are two competing views: (1) money is determined by the market or (2) chartalism which asserts that ‘money [...]