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June 14, 2007

Your Cash is Trash, and So Are Most of Your Investments
by Doug Casey

Almost everyone, probably including yourself, gets held back by inertia at one time or another. It can happen with anything, including investments.

Inertia weighs on an investor, trapping him in a state of paralysis and freezing his portfolio, almost forcing him to hold on to whatever he already owns - for no better reason than that he already owns it. He hopes that every one of his old shoes will go up, even if the reason for the purchase is long forgotten or the environment in which the investment might have prospered has vanished. People who substitute hope for cold-blooded analysis almost inevitably wind up losing money.

So, for the sake of argument, let's look at where you might best put your money for the rest of the year 2007. To keep things simple, let's assume you start by liquidating all the cats and dogs populating your portfolio, so that you have just a pile of cash. No, let's not phrase it that way... because then you're going to start wondering which of the securities you own really are cats and dogs. You might get bogged down. And then inertia will creep back in, and you'll throw your hands up and do nothing. So let's assume you sell everything, in true going-out-of-business style.

Now, what's the smartest place to put that money? Let's look at the alternatives.

Bonds? A disastrous sucker bet. Bonds, at the moment, are a triple threat to your capital. First, you have a huge risk with interest rates, which are still near historic lows; as they go up, the market value of your bonds drops proportionately. Second, no matter which of the fiat currencies you choose, you have a big currency risk; while the US dollar is on the fast train to zero, virtually every other currency in the world is being inflated along with it and is heading toward eventual oblivion. Third, you have credit risk; General Motors isn't the only large company whose bonds may go into default.

Stocks? The general market is yielding less than 2% in dividends, less than 1/3 of what you typically see at major market bottoms. And selling for more than 18 times earnings -- more than 25% higher than its norm. Worse, for those who might be buyers, the bull market of the century started in 1982 and, in inflation-adjusted terms, ended in 2000. You might not want to hear it, but stocks are almost certainly early into a bear market that could last another 5 or 10 years. By all traditional measures, chances are much better that stocks will drop 50% from here than gain 50%.

Cash? You could always just stay in T-bills. But they currently yield only 5%, before taxes. And inflation (notwithstanding the highly imaginary official figures) is probably running around 6% and likely to head higher.

Real Estate? At the present, at least in the U.S., this is probably the worst choice of all. The speculative boom crested last year, and the market, burdened by an immense amount of debt and overleveraged speculation, is likely to head down for years to come. Of course, there are places in the world, two of our favorites being Argentina and Uruguay, where there isn't much of a mortgage market, so the properties aren't overleveraged and values are still available. But unless you are looking to pick up cheap land in undeveloped, exotic countries that have avoided the credit-driven bubble, real estate should be last on your list of investments.

Mutual funds? Any mutual fund you're likely to pick is just a way of buying one of the investments we've already dismissed. And paying all those fees and expenses that come with a mutual fund just makes the bet that much worse.

So What Should You Do?

Since 2001, we've been in a natural resources bull market. If you were one of the few who positioned yourself in gold, silver or pretty much any of the metals or energy commodities - either directly or through the shares in smaller resource companies, which is the preferred vehicle we have been recommending to subscribers of our International Speculator -- you've already made the easy money.

At least to us, before the bull market kicked off, the opportunity in the sector seemed obvious, with many resource companies selling for less than the cash they had in the bank. Few people even knew the sector existed, and most of them thought it was a dead duck after the 20-year-long bear market it had suffered since 1980.

The easy-money stage of the resource bull ended in 2003, at which time we entered the second stage, where the market climbs a "wall of worry." In even the most formidable of bull markets, this phase comes with inevitable corrections and scary downdrafts. Per its moniker, with each short-term setback in price, investors who were shrewd enough to get positioned early on into the long bull market fret that they might be wrong. Some are shaken out, but the smart ones buy even more on the dips.

But now, in my opinion, we are about to enter the third, and most important, stage of the classic bull market: the mania stage. This will resemble the tail-end of the Internet stock bull market. It's hard to predict exactly what catalyst will set it off, but it will very likely be rising expectations for inflation. Fear will drive the foreigners who hold about $6 trillion to sell the greenback, and they'll be joined by savvy Americans. Some will buy other paper currencies, like the euro or the yen. But those units are just backed by U.S. dollars themselves, so they really aren't much in the way of an escape pod. Inevitably, much of the money now sloshing through the world will try to get into gold. While no one can say with certainty, I expect the metal to hit $1,000 within the next 12 months and go much, much higher by the end of the decade.

Is this an unreasonable prediction? No.

Most casual investors mistakenly look at gold and think it's been a leader in this bull market when, in actual fact, it's a laggard compared to the industrial metals that have been bidden up to extraordinary highs by soaring demand from China, India and other emerging markets.

To give you just a few examples, in the last five years, copper has been up 330%, nickel 560%, uranium 1,150%, zinc up 460%, molybdenum up 450%, and even lowly lead, the most basic of base metals, is up 425%. By comparison, gold is up only 100%.

That will change, however, because although gold has many and growing industrial uses, it's main use is as money. It will dawn on the herd that the world is drowning in a flood of increasingly worthless paper currency, and they're going to stampede toward the high ground of gold.

The metal isn't just going through the roof. It's going to the moon.

Gold Good, Gold Shares Better

When gold really starts to move, the mining exploration stocks are going to howl. That's because gold exploration stocks are not just highly leveraged plays on the price of gold. They are capable of providing you with triple-digit gains based on exploration success alone.

Case in point, the last mining share boom from 1993-96, which occurred at the tail-end of gold's 20-year bear market and carried hundreds of stocks with it, was driven entirely by a handful of discoveries. Since gold prices turned up, starting in 2001, a lot of money has been spent on exploration, and that work will inevitably lead to major discoveries and market excitement. Several of the companies we follow in our International Speculator are already drilling into what look to be monster deposits. Confirmation of a major discovery could well ignite a mania in the market.

While most other investments, such as bonds, industrial stocks, real estate and broad mutual funds are likely to be serious losers over the coming years, the bull market in gold and gold exploration stocks has still barely entered the public's consciousness. Although the easy money has been made, the big money is waiting to be picked up.

Nothing in the investing world is ever a sure thing, but today the exploration stocks look to be as close as it gets. As for the inevitable corrections during this "wall of worry" phase, remember that the time to be timid is when everyone else is bold, and the time to be bold is when everyone else is timid. Sell-offs in the gold and gold mining sector are, to our way of thinking, gift-wrapped opportunities to buy.

Doug Casey is chairman of Casey Research, LLC., one of the nation's oldest and most respected organizations dedicated to providing independent investors with unbiased research on opportunities to earn extraordinary profits by being just ahead of the crowd. BIG GOLD, new from Casey Research, provides subscribers with actionable research on the unfolding gold bull market and on profiting from the world's best gold producers, near-producers, gold mutual funds, ETFs and more. You can try it without risk. To find out how, click here.

Doug Casey, Chairman
Casey Research, LLC.

Doug Casey, Chairman of Casey Research, LLC., is a best - selling author, international investor and entrepreneur. He travels the world looking for exceptional opportunities in real estate and undervalued companies in the natural resource sector (precious metals, oil and gas and more). The author of four best selling books, his Crisis Investing was #1 on the New York Times best-seller list for 29 consecutive weeks. Each month he provides subscribers to his publication, the International Speculator with his best ideas on the worlds best precious metal investments. For a risk-free trial membership, click here.

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