In Times Of Trouble Gold Is Where The Smart Money Goes

These are turbulent times we are passing all around the world and many markets seem to be in free fall as everybody tries to second guess which way the wind is going to blow.

One bad investment decision and you’ve got everything to lose. So this is not a time for taking unnecessary risks. On the other hand, making the right decision now can save you a lot of worry and heartache and pave the way to a prosperous new future.

And at a time when everything is up in the air (except for airlines it seems) -when even major companies like Virgin are looking to the Australian and UK governments for financial help in weathering the prevailing economic storm which has accompanied the coronavirus crisis — it can be difficult for investors to know where to put their money.

Some stocks and shares are in a highly volatile state at the moment, to say the least. So, is there anywhere you can put your hard-earned money that could be called a safe haven? Well actually yes there is.

A Safe Haven For Your Money

For many investors, small or large, gold is the way to go. One expert has suggested that between 2 and 10 per cent of your portfolio dedicated to gold can, over time, greatly enhance the performance of the entire portfolio. Obviously, the protection of your assets is a must, and gold certainly has that quality, but combine that with positive performance and it would seem you can’t go wrong.

Gold has a long history of holding its value in times of trouble, stock market volatility, and political uncertainty. Certainly, there is a history of gold outperforming major currencies when stock markets are spiralling downward, as indeed they are at this moment in time. Gold is the safe haven of choice for professional investors all around the world, and there are very good reasons for that.

A Long History of Value

Gold has a very long history of being special and valuable to a wide variety of cultures. This is because it is a highly attractive material which does not corrode over time. It is also relatively easy to work with needing nothing more than an open flame to make it malleable. For this reason, it is highly valued in places like India where it is widely used for making jewellery.

In China, on the other hand, it tends more to be seen as something to keep in ingots, no doubt hedging against any downturns in a lot less stable or trustworthy commodities. For all of this and a lot more, gold is always in high demand. And high demand equals high value and high prices. And that makes gold a highly commendable place to safeguard your money.

A Brilliant Investment

Yet another great advantage is relative scarcity. It has been said that if you got all the gold in the world together in one place it would not be enough to fill the patio beneath the Eiffel Tower. As with most things which are scarce, the less of it there is the higher the value of the little that there is. Also affecting the value and price of gold are political uncertainty and geopolitical tensions.

In short, when nation countries experience disaccord between themselves gold goes up in value. Due to the coronavirus, plus complicated trade negotiations — the USA at odds with China, European countries at odds with a post-Brexit United Kingdom, and a disenfranchised Greece and Finland — gold is where the smart money goes. It is a tangible asset you can see, touch and hold, and over the longer term, it will never lose any of those qualities nor its shining brilliance or any of its mysterious desire.

You Can Trust in Gold

Gold has been in high demand since time immemorial and that is not going to change for a very long time to come. Even the ordinary man in the street who knows very little of the world and the global events that affect the sometimes bewildering field of high finance and stocks and shares and commodities, trusts gold even more than he does money.

Of course, as with any investment, the value of any commodity can go down as well as it can go up. However, over the longer term, gold has proven to outperform almost any other commodity. The thing to remember is that it is exactly at times like these when the market goes down, gold soars, that is a historical fact. So if ever there was a time to buy into gold that time is now.

How to Triple Your Money

They say that hindsight is a wonderful thing, but just think on, if in nineteen ninety-eight you had bought an ounce of gold, by 2008 you would have tripled your money as it hit 1000 dollars an ounce.

If you had kept it longer still, say until 2012 you would have seen that same ounce of gold hit between 1,800 and 1,900 dollars an ounce. Now that is surely an investment worth thinking about.

Please note I am not a financial expert. Any investment can go up or down depending upon circumstances.

Who Really Invented Bitcoin?

Trying to get to the bottom of who really invented Bitcoin is not unlike trying to nail down who killed JFK. However, by chance and deduction, I might just have finally come up with a plausible candidate for the mystery inventor.

When you think about it, the idea of creating invisible money is brilliant. In effect, that is exactly what Bitcoin is. The transactions that take place online are between you and your computer. There is no middleman such as a bank and no internal revenue. Bitcoin is a totally unregulated field of finance. It is not too surprising then that lots of people, including the mafia, have taken that cash from under the mattress or wherever else they normally keep it hidden and invested it in all sorts of cryptocurrency. Crypto of course says it all. The word means 'secret or hidden.' So that is the nature of the beast by name as well as by its modus operandi. I suppose the whole idea is more than a little mysterious, to say the least. But it goes deeper than this.

For as long as I can remember I have been something of an amateur sleuth and etymologist, forever intrigued about the history of words and where they come from. In the UK I used to sometimes invent a history for a word if I didn't know what it really was. I would joke around about certain words, like 'restaurant', and came up with the idea that that word came about as a corruption of the phrase 'Rest your aunt', a place where one could take one's aunt Alice for a bite to eat, somewhere you could 'rest your aunt.'

These days I live in Japan and when I looked up a translation of the name Satoshi Nakamoto, Google came up with, wait for it, 'Central Intelligence.' So, the inventor is not so much a single person but in fact a group of very smart people who operate off the radar for what passes for normal civilised society. And who else is more secretive than the Central Intelligence Agency, or the CIA as they are better known? And, who else but they could come up with the name for who they are hidden in what passes for a real sounding name, Satoshi Nakamoto, Central Intelligence.

Now I know that this all sounds like very conspiracy theorist, but pretty much all conspiracy theories do have some basis in truth. The question is, why? Why would somebody want to invent invisible money? More to the point, who exactly would have a very good motive for doing so? Yes, the CIA might be capable, but who else could have done it?

Well the mafia for a start, but I'm not too sure that they have the technological wherewithal. Then you've got the corrupt super-rich who would dearly love somewhere to hide their undeclared income which runs into billions. Again, I have my doubts that they have the intellect to execute such an idea. Finally, it occurred to me that one of the other big players, the biggest of all, in fact, would have to be the government.

The idea of a government is attractive in more ways than one. Not only do corrupt politicians have a great deal of self-interest in mind, but potentially a series of cryptocurrencies could be used for all manner of altruistic reasons such as undermining a target country's economic well-being. Or it could possibly be used to fool all those mafia guys and corrupt rich folk to trust their ill-gotten gains to a hiding place that one day will all be swept up into government coffers. What a brilliant idea. The only weak point in this theory is that I am not that certain that politicians have the brain capacity to think this through.

Of course, I could be wrong. On the other hand......The more I think about this I realise that my theory is the work of a total and utter madman (me) or the concept of a genius at play (also me). There is absolutely no point at this time in my long life hiding behind false modesty, ahem. However, genius as I might be at working this all out, the Nobel Prize for having the economic smarts to make or ruin the world economy by actually coming up with the idea of invisible money in the first place has to go to.......Central Intelligence, or Mr Satoshi Nakamoto if they prefer. After that, who knows? My younger brother always tells me to 'Follow the money.' Not that easy when the said money is as invisible as Scotch Mist. So for my money, what little there is of it, I'm sticking with the CIA, or Satoshi Nakamoto as the Japanese say.