From 2003–2011, the price of gold increased from about $400 an ounce to over $1,900. And by the summer of 2011, the market was going crazy with expectations.
There were predictions of $10,000 an ounce… $50,000 an ounce… even $100,000 an ounce. And people were talking about gold everywhere. If you think back, I bet you’ll remember all those “cash for gold” advertisements that ran back in 2011.
But with so much hype surrounding gold at the time, I decided to exit the market completely. I sold pretty much all of my precious metal positions and walked away with a big profit.
Now, I’ll tell you, I’m not foolish enough to believe I have any kind of special ability or knowledge to predict market trends. The fact of the matter was I had made myself and my subscribers a bunch of money and there was no point in getting greedy. But I ended up walking away from gold within a month of the exact top of the 2011 rally.
Call it luck. Because it was a good move.
Over the next few years the hype around gold died off. And by the summer of 2015, the gold and precious metal market was all but dead. A lot of gold and silver companies had changed, or were in the middle of changing, their focus to other minerals like lithium and nickel. No one wanted to be a gold investor. That’s when I got a call from a friend of mine named Gary Freeman.
I had met Gary several years prior through work. He was the CEO of a gold exploration firm working in Mexico called Pediment Exploration, which I followed and recommended to my subscribers. And I don’t mean to divert from the story too much here, but sometimes you meet people in the journey of your life with whom you have some kind of unexplainable connection and/or ability to communicate without words. You call these people “friends.” I had that connection with Gary. So that’s why he was calling me four years after I had walked away from the gold market.
Anyway, by summer 2015 Gary had mostly exited the precious metal industry himself. At the time, he was helping promote a company that was aiming to support the decline in the global bee population. But I asked him anyway about the gold market.
His response would alter the course of my life.
When I asked Gary how the gold market was doing, he said bluntly, “F*ck the gold market.”
When I heard those four words, it almost felt like time stood still. You see, Gary was one of the most animated stock promoters I’ve ever personally known. The guy had a manic-like enthusiasm for the precious metal business. I remember he would get so excited about positive news for the company and shareholders he would literally dance… in public… with a hundred people watching… and not be embarrassed.
So for Gary to be telling me now, “F— the gold market” was like Santa Claus telling me, “F— Christmas.” If Gary, who was one of the loudest gold market cheerleaders I’ve ever met, was telling me, “F— the gold market,” everyone else was thinking the same thing.
And to me that meant the market was, or was close to, bottoming out.
That’s when I reentered the gold market. I started buying gold and gold stocks sometime around November 2015 — which again was within a month of the exact bottom.
Gold prices rapidly picked up after 2015 and topped out at over $2,000 earlier this year.
Since then, however, gold prices have remained under severe pressure from what seems to be an unstoppable rally in the U.S. dollar. Despite domestic inflation rising to a four-decade high, the value of the USD (as measured by the USD Index) currently sits near a 20-year high.
As a result, gold prices have dramatically fallen, dipping as low as nearly $1,600 an ounce. And again the strongest sentiment is, “F— the gold market.” No one cares about investing in gold right now. There’s no hype in the market at all. And again, that’s a sign the gold market is, or is close to, bottoming-out right now. So we should be watching the market carefully.
Gold is generally a contrarian bet, folks.
And there’s no more contrarian bet right now than gold.
Epilogue: The epilogue to the story with Gary is personally shameful for me. But if only one person reads this and does the opposite of what I did, it’s worth telling. You may have noticed that I have been referring to Gary in the past. That’s because a few years after that 2015 phone call, Gary passed away from cancer.
I didn’t have much contact with Gary after that 2015 call. He would call. But often I wouldn’t answer the phone. That’s because I was dealing with my own personal shit. I was working a whole lot, spending every day with my girlfriend, and just generally focusing on myself and my own life. I had my head up my own ass.
That 2015 phone call was one of the last times I talked to Gary. And I will regret for the rest of my life every time I didn’t answer the phone when he called. So don't do what I did. Don’t get so wrapped up in your own life that you turn your back on your friends. The genuine connections you make with people are few and far between. What do you think I’d give to answer his phone call now?
If you get to heaven before I do, tell Gary I’m sorry for me, will ya? You’ll know him when you see him. He’ll be the guy dancing in public.
