Why no lockdown in Q4 2016?

image by Alexander Dummer 

Looking at the data from EuroMOMO (independent site who publish weekly bulletins of the all-cause mortality levels in up to 24 European countries or regions of countries), you get a pretty good view of when deaths occur through the year in Europe.

Courtesy of EuroMOMO - from https://www.euromomo.eu/outputs/images/Pooled-number.png

For the 2 age groups 15-64 and 65+ there is a clear pattern that occurs in the last month of a year and the next 2-3 months in the new year. Is this maybe the flu season in Europe?

Certainly looks that way!

Anyone else surprised that the COVID death rates in the Southern Hemisphere aren’t that high at present? Well, its highly likely that its not flu season and the last thing I’ll leave you with is -

Why was there no lockdown in Q4 2016?

The deaths in the 65+ years was as high in Q4 2016 as it is today. This is not about the COVID pandemic, it is a financial crisis. The actions of the comrades in central governments around the world are louder than ever and while you are asleep, they are looting everything. PS - I once sold one South African Rand for four Zimbabwe dollars, and later one South African Rand for billions of Zimbabwe dollars, I’ve seen this before (although not as subtle).

• Isn’t it absurd that for every $1200 cheque that goes out in the US … almost 100k in debt per person is added (your children and grand children are being indebted for life)

• Apple and Google are now providing your data to governments around the world to track (this is the 1984 Orwellian nightmare - were you paid for this, it’s your data after all)

• Physical gold and silver is way more expensive than the paper IOUs (financial games to rob people of their wealth?)

• People were paid to take oil away at $40 barrel (first time in history)

• Cash is being targeted again (no cash means you can go into negative interest rates, which destroys savings)

• Governments are buying JUNK bond ETFs (that is communism, and most central banks have no mandate to do this)

• 16-17m people are un-employed and the stock market has its biggest gain ever (Wall Street can not be human)

• The FAANG stocks just broke out to new all time highs (how will people pay for their products in the future - I don’t know)

• There are no markets that trade like real markets, people can’t compete against endless paper chequebooks (Except for one - Crypto markets)

On the last point - you won’t believe what is happening, the comrades are now looking to regulate it and ban some of them too. Fiat proxy coins (because they work better then their own digits - i.e. you can have fiat stable coins in peoples hands by the weekend if they have a smartphone, not months like the current cheque system in the US - by the time the cheques arrive they’ll have starved to death) and privacy coins are also on the hit list (of course privacy coins will be on the list - governments need to know everything about everyone - so my question is - who guards the guardian?) .

Apparently the populations around the world all need saving from crypto because it is so volatile. Well if it is so volatile, then don’t buy them and leave the crypto community alone. When the crypto industry was being setup, they didn’t ask for hand outs and they are not asking for any now. The millennial generation and beyond needs a break, they’ve been indebted by idiotic policies for years now to protect boomers retirements - let them have Bitcoin and crypto - from the chart below they must be doing something right.

Courtesy of stockcharts.com - https://stockcharts.com/freecharts/perf.php?$INDU,$SPX,$BTCUSD

It may be volatile, it is still 1200% superior to stocks from 2014 (I dare you to check it from when it started). With all the money printing around the world - what do you think will happen to this chart going forward and can you now see why “the comrades” are looking to interfere - email your representatives around the world today and let them know you will not stand for it - we owe it to our children and grand children.

This madness needs to stop, having this community as an enemy will not end well for the comrades.

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#COVID19 - Fear is the goal

Image by Free To Use Sounds

Its taken me a while to get my thoughts together on the madness that is COVID19. Almost every conversation globally has been taken over and the hysteria seems to be getting worse.

At the time of writing, there have been approx 30,000 deaths attributed to COVID19. My thoughts go out to all the families who have lost loved ones to this virus and I know that nothing I say will bring them back.

My aim is to try and slowdown the hysteria and suggest a different way of looking at the numbers that are being presented, ask why they are being presented in this way and then hopefully help you to come to your own conclusions.

There is a conversation going around that talks about a bag of 100 skittles and 3 of them are poisoned, would you take one? This is supposedly referring to the “calculated death rate of COVID19”. Let’s switch it around a little, you are starving and haven’t eaten for week, there are 100 bread rolls and 97 are fine and 3 are poisoned, would you take a chance taking one and eating it if your life depended on it? Subtle difference but hopefully you get the point.

The next point I’d like to address is the confirmed cases vs number of deaths statistic. You can see all the COVID19 data on the World Health Organisation (WHO) website. What is puzzling for me, is why a known (deaths per country) is used with an unknown (confirmed cases). I.e. From a statistical point of view, you should really only be using “known knowns”. Confirmed cases is not a known known, there are countless un-confirmed cases, it is impossible to tell with any accuracy who has had the virus, how effective the test is by country and lastly how effective the record keeping is in each country.

So what else do we know, well we have a pretty good take on the population numbers as referenced on wikipedia - List_of_countries_by_population. So lets see what story we can tell about survival rates using July 2019 data (I have not used forecasted population numbers based on previous growth rates, but could have done so - the survival rate will increase if I’d have done it this way).

The countries listed below account for 94.07% of COVID19 deaths to-date (28258), so there’s no question on the sample size. The Survival rate to date *(to 4 decimal places) for these countries seem pretty high to me. Even Italy, with its >10k deaths, has a very high 99.9834% survival rate to date, with Spain being the other outlier with a survival rate to date of 99.9878%.

Survival rate = (1-(COVID19 deaths/popultion)*100

data as at 30 Mar 2020

* I understand this rate will only decrease as we go if we do not adjust the monthly population numbers, but remember this was a test to get a feel for the scale of the problem, month on month analysis should give you the flattening and factoring the countries growth rate will also have a material impact on increasing the survival rate

Next up, lets have a look at the data in a slightly different way, i.e. The number of survivors per COVID19 death by a countries total population. It is simply the inverse of the survival rate calculated above. So here we see that in China, for every ~434k people, 1 person dies of COVID19. In Italy that number is 1 in 6041 (thats about 166 people in 1 million).

data as at 30 Mar 2020

As per the Italy example above, I have include the deaths per million for our sample of 12 countries in the chart below and I’ve also included the estimated growth/decline in populations for Q1 2020. This data was calculated from the same data referenced above, available on wikipedia, which gives the population growth rate from July-2018 to July-2019. I have used these to calculate the estimated Q1 growth in populations.

data as at 30 Mar 2020

What I find most fascinating with the chart above, is that for populations that are either declining or close to flat, the deaths per million number tends to spike, Spain and Italy being a case in point. Going deeper into the Italy number, it was projected that the population of Italy would decline by approx 19,200 by end of Q1 2020 anyway.

I do not mean to trivialise the Italy numbers but lets just put some perspective on the numbers. I’ve included further analysis by region which includes data from 2/3 of the worlds population (some 5.145Bn people of a total of 7.713Bn). I will update this analysis at some point to include more countries to get to 80%, but you’ll hopefully get the point.

data as at 30 Mar 2020

The deaths per million people attributed to COVID19 currently sits at 5.56 people (or 1 out of every 179,9596 people globally have died from COVID19) and your survival rate, as it currently stands, is 99.9994%

In the same time that we have mourned 30k deaths to COVID19, the world has celebrated the birth of millions of babies **, the first 3 months of 2020 - the world population has grown by ~20.5m

**congrats my friend on the birth of Willow over the weekend

What do you think happens to the survival rate if we add ~20.5 million people to world population every 3 months - it goes up - i.e. we get closer and closer to 100% and the probability of survival increases.

So why then are the numbers being presented in the way that they are and why is the world going into a systematic financial melt-down. These are some of the questions that I’ve been asking myself:

1. Why focus on deaths and not survival?

2. Why use confirmed cases (its almost impossible to measure and using it will guarantee you create max fear with the 3/100 deaths)?

3. Why have main stream media focused on the death rates and not survival rates?

4. Why has the federal reserve gone from fractional reserve banking to non reserve banking (it matters because the dollar is the global reserve currency - wars have been fought over this behaviour)?

5. Why are we doing QE again if everything was so wonderful?

6. Why are corporates being bailed out?

7. Who benefits?

Having watched the movie, The Great Hack - Official Trailer here if you haven’t seen it, I can’t help but think that this virus is being used in a global thought experiment. The strategies employed are similar and to be honest, some of the videos we’ve seen circulating are incredible in how they’ve manipulated peoples behaviour in a time of crisis.

“It is impossible to know what is what - because nothing is what it seems”

…The Great Hack

The craze that started globally for toilet paper is a classic. I mean of all the things you really need in a lockdown if your life depended on it - toilet paper would not be one (think shower, river, sea etc to resolve toilet paper issue) and Maslow's hierarchy of needs for what’s really important.

From where I’m sitting, it looks like fear is the goal. Never let a crisis go to waste is the old saying - well this time was a master stroke. The central bankers have got their way to no-reserve banking, the politicians have a scapegoat for the pension crisis. What’s more its even been done in such a way to prevent people going out and objecting by enforcing lock-downs and quarantines across the globe.

In this extraordinary time, be safe, ensure you have diversified everything. If you haven’t yet looked at and educated yourselves on Gold / Silver / Bitcoin / ETH and other Crypto assets, start now! If you need help with the latter, visit Crypto Participation on our site to get started.

There is a great opportunity to learn about these now. Fiat currency (which is not money) is about to flow in massive quantities. Keep an eye open for giveaways and any attempted inroads made to reduce you privacy rights, they are never free and the people getting and asking for them are more than likely the ones who least benefit from the long term arrangement of handouts and state sanctioned monitoring.

To all the nurses, doctors and medical professionals, who have worked tirelessly in hospitals and clinics around the world (in-spite of the mass fear that has been created) - Thank You!

Link to Analysis here

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The Golden Constant - Part 2

image by Lopez Robin

The purchasing power of gold is truly spectacular when chaos is about you - it actually packs an enormous punch. Now I can hear you all say … the last month, gold has been down almost 15% in dollar terms, this is no place to put my savings.

My reply would be yes, you are correct, but the thing you are missing is that gold is able to buy so much more in times like this. Don’t believe me, but believe this. In ~36 years, you have never been able to buy cheaper oil than now. In 2008 (GFC time) you could buy about 1/5 barrel of oil with 1 gram of gold, the long term average is approx 2 grams per barrel - TODAY IT IS A MASSIVE - 2 BARRELS PER GRAM.

The problem that most people make is giving it a dollar, pound or euro value - try change the way you are wired to think about how much or many of an item it will buy. Also use it to value assets, you will get a very good idea about how cheap or expensive other assets are.

In todays climate when central banks and banks can create currency so easily (in fact we have just gone from fractional reserve banking to no-reserve banking curtesy of the virus). As a result of this money creation, it is very difficult to value assets, and if you are saving for retirement, you want to ensure you are able to value investments. Using fiat to value assets, really isn’t the way to do it - it is actually the trap.

Gold has consistently been the best asset to protect your purchasing power - I sure hope you are enjoying The Golden Constant: The English and American Experience 1560-2007 by Roy W. Jastram (Author), Jill Leyland (Editor)

Order in Market Chaos

image by Brett Jordan

Is there really such a thing as order in chaos?

Well guess what - the answer is yes. And it doesn’t only apply to the breading habits of rabbits. I’ve linked a youtube video below which talks about “The Feigenbaum Constant (4.669)”. The chaps at Numberphile do a great job at explaining the theory and how the 4.669 constant is calculated.

Their work introduces viewers to the extensive fractal work completed my Mandelbrot and would you believe that the constant is everywhere when analysing financial assets.

We’ve all seen the power of the fibonacci numbers in various asset retraces and extensions but there are some incredible observations when using chaos theory to understand asset price movements.

Would you have believed me in Aug 2017 when BTC broke out above $3000 that it was projecting at least a monthly close of $13500? Well here you are …

To see how we use the 4.669 and other KCLs (Key Chaos Levels) in our trading, check out our education page, there is a pdf you can download for free.

As previuosly mentioned here is the video to “The Feigenbaum Constant (4.669)” by Numberphile

Binge on learning at The Great Courses Plus: http://ow.ly/Z5yR307LfxY The Feigenbaum Constant and Logistic Map - featuring Ben Sparks. Ben Sparks: https://tw...

The Golden Constant - Part 1

Apologies, but the start of the year has been very busy. I’d like to do a quick blog on an important book I recently read. With the price of gold showing significant strength, its worth trying to find out why.

I’d highly recommend that you read The Golden Constant: The English and American Experience 1560-2007 by  The Late Roy W. Jastram (Author), Jill Leyland (Editor)

From Amazon “The Golden Constant is a unique examination of how gold's purchasing power has remained consistent over the centuries. First published in 1977, this new edition has additional material to bring it up to date. The book is the only in-depth examination of how the purchasing power of gold has performed over the centuries in both England and the USA. It contains a thorough explanation of how the gold market evolved and how this is related to economic and political developments, from 1560 in England, and from 1800 in the USA, up to 2007. The book also contains detailed historical statistics on gold, wholesale and consumer prices and the real price of gold. This important book will be an essential resource for institutional and individual investors in the gold industry. Academics, economic historians and economists interested in monetary and financial history will find this book to be a fascinating read”

Increasing financial literacy

image by Susan Yin

One of the questions I get ask very often is what shall I do with this asset and that investment. In addition to his, these words are often repeated by at least 80% of the individuals I interact with “I just don’t know where to start”.

Look at this how you want to, education systems around the world are failing to prepare their citizens for financial success. On the one hand they are very good at producing individuals that do all the wrong things in financial markets… but maybe this is actually the plan.

The Crypto revolution has had an amazing effect on a lot of young people who are starting to see the financial games for what they really are, but like all fine wines, the knowledge required to thrive takes a long time to mature. If you do not come from a financially successful family who have imparted some of the “golden rules” at a young age, then you are going to have to learn the hard way and sometimes buy the time you have learned the lessons required, there won’t be much time to secure you financial freedom.

I will be using this blog to post links and education material that I have personally read, listen to and watched. I’m not convinced that this will help the broader population, but at least its a start and sometimes people just want to be told what to do with their finances and are more than happy to take advice from the experts (don’t forget that these are the very same experts that have not corrected course since 2008).

If anything this will serve as a location to store my thoughts and ideas so that in the future my son and daughter have a reference point to further their studies. Unfortunately I can’t do it for them either … they will have to take ownership for their own decisions and educate themselves.

For further material please see our education page

Mandatory Reading

I’m often asked by people to recommend good books to read in the finance and investment space. Although there are numerous titles out there, one book that always comes to mind, and one that should be on the mandatory reading list, is the Fourth turning by Howe / Strauss.

The video linked below is a wonderful taster of what is covered in the book. From defining emerging and new trends, explaining the long term 80-90 year cycles, walking you through what to expect through the high, awakening, unraveling and crisis (4 turnings). The crisis or fourth turning consists of 4 phases: catalyst, regeneration, crisis and resolution gives insight into our current social, political and economic cycle and what to expect.

In my opinion this book should be mandatory reading for anyone who wants to understand the real economic forces at play within the global economy.

The property game - monopoly

image by BP Miller

How often have you heard the following statement while out and about, in the queue at the coffee shop or even sat at the dinner table with friends and family “can you believe the insane appreciation in property values”?

I often find myself leaning in to have a listen to the replies and you’ll be surprised to hear what’s listed as the reason:

• The builders aren’t building enough so we have a supply issue

• The demand from foreign investors is crowding out local families and is pushing up price

• Safe as houses, property always goes up in this or that key city

• Mortgages are so easy to get these days anyone can buy, massively increasing demand

• the new golf course, railway or shopping centre has done the trick in this area

There are many more of the above reasons but I’d like to give you another way to look at this and then hopefully next time you hear the statement you’ll be able to give a slight better reason that’s far closer to the truth than the other reasons.

I’ll use the game of monopoly as an aid. Just think back through the last time you played the game, at the start everyone gets the same amount of money and the prices of the property on the board are all fixed. The streets become more expensive as you move through the different colours, each player must decide if they are going down the quality or quantity route with their purchases. Now suppose one player gets 4 times the cash at the start of the game and 4 times the cash after going through begin each time. What price do you think he/she will be willing to bid up prices to if they went to auction? If you guessed 4x, you’d be correct. Having 4 times the firepower as the player next to you gives you a great advantage, you won’t necessarily always bid 4x to beat your rival to a purchase but the option is there.

Now let us suppose that the everyone in the game gets 4 times the cash at the start of the game and 4 times the amount after going through begin, everyone will be prepared to pay 4 times the value of the properties on the board and over time this is what will happen. At this point it would be prudent to take out a permanent ink marker and adjust all the prices in the game by a factor of 4.

By adding extra money to the game you can change the value of the property even if there are no changes made to them.

Now, back to the original statement, if governments have added 3-4 times the money in the system since the GFC, are you still surprised to see asset price’s like property increase 3-4x. I’m not and I’d say there are some isolated cases where some assets have only increased by a factor of 2 times since 2008. This makes these cheap relative to others like the stock market which have mirrored the money printing programs.

"Bitcoin vs Gold" or is it "Bitcoin and Gold"?

image by Dmitry Demidko

Its been a really difficult title to decide on. Bitcoin vs Gold or Gold vs Bitcoin is the one most people want to see and read about because for some reason they feel they must pick a side and join the team and cheer for and against the other. Gold bugs and bitcoin maximalists are constantly justifying why their “non fiat” asset proxy is better than the other one. Wasn’t the #dropgold campaign hysterical… it seemed to take place at the exact moment when Gold broke out relative to 99.9% of all fiat currencies across the globe. Equally silly were all our gold bug friends who for 10 years before had been calling for the death of bitcoin and who have been revelling in the fact that bitcoin dropped from 19k in early 2018 to around 3k by Dec 2018. What all these famous money men failed to see was when bitcoin went from 150USD to 19K. There are countless reasons why each one is better or worse than the other, but you can go and read up on all that yourself - I don’t care for the competition. This article is about “Gold and Bitcoin”.

There is an age old saying that goes something like this … “divide and conquer”. The basic idea is that to rule effectively the easiest thing to do is to split people up into groups, let them go at each other and then while they are distracted you are able to rule. The people will be so distracted by each other they won’t even notice what is actually happening. We have a really good working example of this in the UK at present, the whole nation has been mesmerised by Brexit, neither side has actually seen the democratic process for what it really is. Imagine voting for something and then your representatives turn around and do the opposite. But none of that is important, what’s important to these 2 groups is: are we in or are we out.

Now you are probably thinking, why am I saying all this? The Bitcoin vs Gold narrative has come from somewhere, and the idea is to set each off against the other, while distracting both to the total loss of fiat currency purchasing power. The benefits of holding both should be fairly obvious and the conversation should be about the allocation percentage between the two.

You see, the one thing that both these wonderful asset classes posses is that they are not FIAT. Their supply is not mandated by a government (in plain english - governments can not create these out of thin air, like they can their own currency) . Its not that we don’t like government, its that when it comes to money creation, their track records aren’t that good. The funny thing with you gold maximalists and bitcoin bugs (hehe) is that you have so much in common, you are practically identical twins - stop this competitive nonsense and find a way to work together.

History doesn't repeat ... but it sure does rhyme

image by Giammarco Boscaro

So what exactly does this mean for you and I when it comes to social and economic events. It means that by looking back into the past we get a very good idea of what can happen in the future. When I say look back in the past, I don’t mean last week or last month or even last year. I am referring to looking back multiple generations and even as far back as the great empires. These empires go through typical phases during conception, growth, stagnation and ultimate decline.

So why is this all so important both socially and economically. I’ll start by covering the social side and this often is highlighted by the political leaders selected by the people. Just looking back 100 years at the selection of far right leaders, gives you a very interesting reference point at what would have been happening for the average person on the street. History tells us about the roaring 20’s and how a small percentage owned a large percentage of the total wealth, while the majority struggled along after the first world war paying off debt. Income gaps were rising and speculation was at extreme levels (anyone remember the 1929 crash) and the depression after that. The backlash at that time was to select pro nationalist, in-ward looking leaders who could solve their countries economic issues. Now, is this in anyway sounding familiar. Parties in the 00’s, technology and real estate speculation while the kids are out fighting the war on terror. Global Financial Crisis, ever widening income gap with stock / bond bubbles and insane levels of corporate and student debt. Brexit and Trump a coincidence?

Hopefully you are seeing the rhythm.

So why is this important for us from an economic perspective. Most of us love our families and wouldn’t want any harm to come to them. We want to be able to provide them with the basic human needs (Maslow does a pretty good job here in his hierarchy of needs). Providing these needs is going to cost money and since most of us work and invest to provide for our family, we may as well check in to see how people did this through the ages. Unfortunately there is no silver bullet and different ideas work in different times. The key is to try and identify where you are in the cycle

The video below does a very good job of identifying ways to protect your family in times of uncertainty and when the current systems are at breaking point and no longer viable. The other questions to ask yourself right now would include:

• Which assets can I own that don’t have counter-party risk

• Are assets and insurance policies I use created by bureaucrats (and under what rules do the insurance policies not payout)

• What assets do well into, during and after recessions

• When do you switch from value to growth and growth to value

I could go on all day but I’ll leave you with one of my favourite quotes on this whole topic

It's important to learn from your mistakes, but it is BETTER to learn from other people's mistakes, and it is BEST to learn from other people's successes. It accelerates your own success.

Jim Rohn

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