I would have to say we are probably near the metals bottom as well. Don't see silver dipping too much more than $18 an ounce. -Action
No free money on markets. When short term money seems effortless it reflects a real risk short term. I agree though miners with expensive mines have fundamental issues, but the larger quality miners may have oversold. Pick your stocks carefully.
Avg life of fiat currency is 40 years. Gold has survived as a form of value for thousands of years. Phys Gold in my eyes is an insurance for my life savings not a trade. I like silver even better. One could even insure their savings with a pile of class 5 rock or barrels of whiskey. Same concept. Diversify in Hard Assets as insurance against fiat currencies because they can and will go to zero. There will be some sort of global currency reset in my lifetime and I am insured for that. Then again this only applies to a very small percentage of people because 99% live paycheck to paycheck anyhow. Don't have all your eggs in one basket ie paper.
I don't own any gold and I have never owned a single ounce of it. I have no intention of buying any in the short term as I believe I can generate a higher rate of return over the next year or two as a trader than I can long gold. That said I believe that sometime in the next ten or twenty years fiat will fall apart ... pretty much completely apart. It could even be as soon as five years. In the span of a single generation the underpinnings of sane financial and political behavior have gone from bad, to worse, to shit. I've made fun of gold bugs and doom and gloomers most of my life. Now my questions revolve around when ... not if. We may well see it all in any order imaginable: Depression, inflation, confiscaton, repudiation and the social consequences a world endures from prolonged insanity. I recommend two fine movies that express (given some literary license) where I think we are at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_Hearts_(1966_film) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5U4TtYpKIc