commodity

Precious metals should let you profit over the next few years if inflation rises (a clear possibility), and gold, silver and platinum stocks attract new investor interest.


What’s more, if the world economy, particularly emerging economies, continues to expand, consumer gold purchases will rise as well....

The ETF, or exchange traded fund, is the biggest advance for individual investors since the introduction of discount brokers. Both help you cut costs. But both these developments expose you to risk as well.

When you deal with a discount broker, you pay a lot less to act on your investment transactions than you would when dealing with a standard broker....

“A rising market climbs a wall of worry.”

—origin unknown, in use with numerous variations, since at least the 1970s

I’ve mentioned many times over the years that the quote above is one of the wisest investment one-liners I’ve come across. However, it can be useful or misleading, depending on how you interpret it.

The best use is to take it as a reminder that in a healthy, rising market that has additional gains ahead, you never run out of things to worry about....

Funds invested in venture capital in the U.S. amounted to $4 billion in 1994; the 2018 figure was a record $100 billion. Note that this is not the total value of U.S. venture capital holdings. These are the amounts of new investment in the field in these two years, respectively.

Back when this burst of growth was just getting started, most venture-capital investment managers acknowledged that perhaps only one in 10 of the deals they financed wound up making any money for investors....

GOODYEAR TIRE & RUBBER CO. $13.31 (Nasdaq symbol GT; TSINetwork Rating: Average) (330-796-2122; www.goodyear.com; Shares outstanding: 232.5 million; Market cap: $3.1 billion; Dividend yield: 4.7%) is one of the world’s largest tire makers. It has 47 production plants in 21 countries.


For the three months ended June 30, 2019, the company’s revenue fell 5.4%, to $3.63 billion from $3.84 billion a year earlier....

One key part of our Successful Investor approach is our “Limelight Rule”: Downplay or avoid stocks in the broker-media limelight.

This is a basic portfolio-construction principle. Heightened attention from brokers and the media is a poor guide to investment profits....

Global ETF assets as of July 31, 2019, amounted to $5.7 trillion, spread across 7,900 ETFs; this was an increase of 19% compared to the end of 2018. These ETFs are listed on 72 exchanges in 58 countries.


Stock ETFs have attracted net-new inflows of $115 billion through the end of July 2019; this was sharply down from the $177 billion last year....

Precious metal ETFs were the star performers in August. The physical gold ETF SPDR Gold Shares (GLD) gained 12.1%, the iShares Silver ETF (SLV) rose 8.6%, and the Aberdeen Physical Platinum ETF (PPLT) improved 4.2%.


Gold miners fared equally well with the VanEck Gold Miners ETF (GDX) adding 11.5% in August....

Both Finning and Toromont excel at controlling costs. That’s a must for equipment providers to the Resources sector as the U.S.-China trade dispute raises fears of a global economic slowdown. The uncertainty hurts commodity prices and slows demand for the heavy equipment of both these leading companies....

“…we suspect that few of today’s cannabis stocks will turn into profitable companies, and many will wind up worthless. We now look at cannabis stocks almost every week. We have yet to find any cannabis stock speculations we can recommend.”

—from the Inner Circle Q&A June 12, 2018

We launched our Pat McKeough’s Inner Circle service 17 years ago....