Happy New Year!

From the beautiful Bahamas, I wish you the very best for 2015. The year just ended has seen tremendous gains in a few areas including large cap US stocks, coffee, and long term treasury bonds – while currencies, gold stocks, and most commodities saw big declines.

The USD is little changed for the year overall, but the gap between its market value and its expected value continues to widen as the half-life value falls away. It remains to be seen whether this marks the end of inflationary policy in the US, but I seriously doubt it. A more likely interpretation is that the USD is heavily overvalued, and a return to the mean is in our future. But whether that return will be gradual or sudden is yet to be determined. With economic conditions in Europe, Japan and Russia deteriorating, and with China possibly entering a slow-down, the US and its dollar look very attractive to investors world-wide, and they are bidding up prices. This could take some time to unwind, though a shock to the system could trigger an avalanche of uncertainty at any point.

If you have profits in stocks, bonds, and USD cash, I suggest taking some of them off the table and banking them in physical gold. Be sure to set trailing stops on the remaining positions so that you can "let your profits run" while being protected in case things reverse.

As I am traveling quite a bit for the next month or two, site updates may not be too frequent, but I will do my best to keep the charts up to date and alert you to any major events in the markets.

I look forward to working with you in the year ahead, and once I get back from my travels, I plan to make improvements to the site and offer new services to help you grow your net worth "the old fashioned way": as measured in gold. Please let me know if there are specific services you would find valuable, such as tracking trailing stops priced in gold, reports on specific investing strategies designed to grow your gold, news reports from the priced in gold perspective, etc. Your ideas and suggestions are extremely valuable.

Thank you for being a part of the Priced in Gold family, and have a great year in 2015!

PS – There are two new pages on the site: Iron Ore (monthly, dating back to 1985) and a weekly summary of asset classes similar to the one included above. Check them out!

PPS – Seth Lipsky of the NY Sun nails it with a great article on the recent "new highs" in the Dow. Worth reading if you haven't already seen it!