Peter Schiff: The only thing that the stimulus package has stimulated is the price of gold.
Haha, I like his quote. It's cute when a host on a Fox News program quoted Schiff, and Schiff was just staring ahead matter-of-factly. Anyway, I'm now taking a breather from gold and silver and looking at other commodities.
I finished a book called Commodities for Dummies. It is quite a comprehensive book, introducing readers to the various commodities and how to get involved in this asset class. It starts off with a brief overview of commodities, and why we should have commodities in our investment portfolio. It then goes on and describe commodities exchanges, ETFs, Indexes, Futures, Options, and some Technical Analysis methods (all boring stuff). For those who are already familiar with these financial stuff, you can skip this whole section to the next sections on Energy, Metals, and Agriculture Commodities. The book gave a brief description of various commodities in these 3 sub groups, and the associated technical stuff that an investor ought to know (For eg. trading months, ticker symbol, contract size, etc).
The book also suggest some factors that may affect the commodity prices. Overall, it's a good book for beginners. For those who want to study more on the data and trends, this book has very little of those.What you will need then is the the following book:
The Commodity Yearbook 2009 by the Commodity Research Bureau (CRB). It is quite a large book by dimensions, and is about 322-pages thick, complete with a CD-ROM. A delicious book in every way, it contains hard data for 100+ commodities from A (Aluminium) to Z (Zinc). Apparently Jim Rogers started with this book back in the 1970s, and he has bought one every year since. This book has been dubbed the "bible" by market analysts and traders since 1939. I was really thrilled when it finally arrived at my doorstep from amazon.com. It took only 4 business days because I used expedited shipping. :)
It is much cheaper to get this book from the US. This one I've got is a whooping SGD 150 cheaper than it is in Kinokuniya Singapore!
At first glance, the amount of data in the book is really mind-numbing. According to the product description, the book contains "over 900 tables, graphs, and price charts of historical data, many of which show price history dating back to 1900". There are also some commentaries and descriptions on each commodity. I think it's advisable to focus on one or two commodities first, study them inside out, and then move on. This was how Jim Rogers got started back then in his 20s. By the way, if you haven't already know, he is a billionaire investor who retired at age 37. At 28, he started a hedge fund called Quantum Fund with George Soros, and over a period of 10 years, the returns on the fund was an impressive 4200%!! In contrast, the S&P advanced only about 47% (and we have not considered the devaluation of the dollar yet). After retirement, he has been travelling around the world, appearing in talk-shows, and has since moved over to Singapore from USA with his family. He believes that the US will not be such a good place to live in anymore in the years ahead.
Jim also started his investment career in the middle of a commodity bull run back then. Right now we're in the middle of one too (I'll say we're about 1/3 through it). But bull or bear, money is there to be made. Read his books and it'll really be a revelation to you.
Good Luck! Time to figure out how to decipher those codes in the CRB Yearbook.
Cheers
Jin
Haha, I like his quote. It's cute when a host on a Fox News program quoted Schiff, and Schiff was just staring ahead matter-of-factly. Anyway, I'm now taking a breather from gold and silver and looking at other commodities.
I finished a book called Commodities for Dummies. It is quite a comprehensive book, introducing readers to the various commodities and how to get involved in this asset class. It starts off with a brief overview of commodities, and why we should have commodities in our investment portfolio. It then goes on and describe commodities exchanges, ETFs, Indexes, Futures, Options, and some Technical Analysis methods (all boring stuff). For those who are already familiar with these financial stuff, you can skip this whole section to the next sections on Energy, Metals, and Agriculture Commodities. The book gave a brief description of various commodities in these 3 sub groups, and the associated technical stuff that an investor ought to know (For eg. trading months, ticker symbol, contract size, etc).The book also suggest some factors that may affect the commodity prices. Overall, it's a good book for beginners. For those who want to study more on the data and trends, this book has very little of those.What you will need then is the the following book:
It is much cheaper to get this book from the US. This one I've got is a whooping SGD 150 cheaper than it is in Kinokuniya Singapore!
At first glance, the amount of data in the book is really mind-numbing. According to the product description, the book contains "over 900 tables, graphs, and price charts of historical data, many of which show price history dating back to 1900". There are also some commentaries and descriptions on each commodity. I think it's advisable to focus on one or two commodities first, study them inside out, and then move on. This was how Jim Rogers got started back then in his 20s. By the way, if you haven't already know, he is a billionaire investor who retired at age 37. At 28, he started a hedge fund called Quantum Fund with George Soros, and over a period of 10 years, the returns on the fund was an impressive 4200%!! In contrast, the S&P advanced only about 47% (and we have not considered the devaluation of the dollar yet). After retirement, he has been travelling around the world, appearing in talk-shows, and has since moved over to Singapore from USA with his family. He believes that the US will not be such a good place to live in anymore in the years ahead.
Jim also started his investment career in the middle of a commodity bull run back then. Right now we're in the middle of one too (I'll say we're about 1/3 through it). But bull or bear, money is there to be made. Read his books and it'll really be a revelation to you.
Good Luck! Time to figure out how to decipher those codes in the CRB Yearbook.
Cheers
Jin
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