I was once told that the best time to start a business is in a recession. The reasoning behind it is that the business would get stronger once the recession is over. Essentially you’re starting at the bottom and can only go up from there. From my experience, this is true. I’ve started several businesses over my life and have closed several businesses too. Some were better than others too. I (we) still have our real estate business but it’s morphed more from a real estate investing business to a holding company.

I just read this CNBC article that Ray Dalio is going long Gold. He believes that the markets are undergoing a paradigm shift and he might be right. The operative word is might. His fund’s been taking losses this year but appears to be recovering this July as gold perks up. Why is gold perking up? There’s a lot of economic and poltical uncertainity happening right now thanks to Trump, the Chinese Tariffs, and many other things.

I’ve been meaning to give you an update on what’s been happening at my local coin show (Feb 2014). The short of it is that general attendance is down, the regulars Numismatics are back, and the majority of dealers are buying silver and gold back. This is an interesting change of sentiment because the last time I was there (about a year ago), gold and silver were at higher levels and lots of noobs were there buying coins.

It’s probably no surprise to my readers that in addition to trading and building neural net models, I like to collect coins and paper money, especially paper money that’s worthless. As a Numismatic, my approach to coin collecting is simple; collect items I like and add in a few items for their metal value (gold and silver). I probably do more collecting nowadays than trading because the markets have become one highly frequent casino.

After I read this WSJ article I realized that we are in the buying opportunity of a lifetime. That is if you are a contrarian, emphasis mine. =) The ups and downs of the market are prompting more retail investors to abandon buy-and-hold strategies in favor of opportunistic trading. Some want more control over their money, so they are fleeing funds and advisers — not to mention the feelings of helplessness raised by recent months’ losses.

Babak posted about a possible double top forming in Gold (and Oil) in his blog a few days ago. While I agree with his technical analysis on the daily charts, I disagree with his conclusion that Gold has topped out. In my mind, Gold is driven 80% by fundamental reasons instead of technical analysis. If you look at the weekly chart, Gold looks poised to possibly make a run higher after this consolidation.