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Jim Rickards, Saudi Arabia, and the “Great Currency Shock of 2016”

What was Rickards pitching this week for his Currency Wars Alert?

By Travis Johnson, Stock Gumshoe, January 20, 2016

I’m absolutely sure that Jim Rickards knows a lot more about the global political economy and currency fluctuation than I do, so I’ll give you that point right up front.

That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s going to be able to make you a lot of money, or that the promises he uses to sell his trading service will come true.

Richards’ Currency Wars Alert and IMPACT System have been very, very heavily promoted in the past year or so by his publisher (Agora), and I haven’t written about him… so I guess it’s time to get around to it.

Why now? Well, partly because he’s had some time to be both right and wrong in his trade recommendations, so our readers who have tried the service out may be able to provide some feedback (is that you? Use the comment box at the bottom, please!) … and partly because his latest big sales push with a “live video event” earlier in the week promoted one specific “secret” trade, so there’s at least one teased idea of his that I can explain for you.

Generally, Rickards is predicting a US recession — caused by the Federal Reserve tightening during a time of weakness… but while that means he says he wouldn’t own US stocks right now, he says he does see opportunities to make money by buying options to leverage his insight into global currency trends.

The basic spiel for this next “currency shock” that he thinks you can profit from is about Saudi Arabia — he says that there have been two big “Currency Shocks” recently from overnight currency revaluations, the first one being the Swiss Franc’s decoupling from the Euro about a year ago (the second was the bump down in the Chinese Yuan, though that’s still underway and it wasn’t just a one-time thing like the Franc)…. and that the next one will be the Saudis removing their currency’s peg to the US Dollar, all of which are little salvos in the “currency war” that he says has been going on around the world since 2010.

This would cause a drop in the value of Saudi businesses, at least in US Dollar terms, so should bring down the value of the Saudi stock market… but, unfortunately, Rickards says there isn’t an easy and liquid way for individual investors to bet against the Saudi currency or stock market, so he has found what he thinks is a very good proxy: Turkey.

His argument, based on his analysis of the past and his expectations about how the dynamics will work in the region, is that a Saudi de-peg will cause the other governments in the region to also bring down the value of their currencies, and that Turkey — with lots of pressures on it from all sides — will be the largest and most liquid market to suffer as a result.

So he’s recommending a bet against Turkey’s market, and since he only recommends buying options in his newsletter/trading service, that means he’s buying puts on a Turkish ETF.

There’s really only one of those, particularly if you want options and liquidity, and that’s the iShares Turkey index ETF, ticker TUR.

Turkey’s market is cheap by most standard valuation metrics (PE of 8, for example), but has also fallen by more than 40% over the past year and is obviously a risky market for geopolitical reasons — if you shoot down a Russian jet and have ISIS and independence-seeking Kurds on your doorstep, let alone a flood of refugees and a perilous connection to the Euro, risks are high and unpredictable. So it makes sense that it’s cheap. Turkey is going to have a slowing economy for quite a while thanks partly to war and refugees cutting into tourism and, like many emerging markets, is beaten down.

Whether the Turkish market will fall further if the Saudi’s depeg their currency from the US Dollar, I have no idea.

The one Saudi Arabian ETF has fallen more or less in line with most other emerging markets ETFs (including TUR), but it has only existed for a couple months (and has no options trading, in case you’re wondering). I also checked with a couple of my brokers, and there are no shares of the Saudi ETF available to sell short… so, surprise surprise, lots of other folks have figured out that the Saudi economy is going to pay a price for their intentional flooding of the global oil market and the crash in oil prices. (That doesn’t necessarily mean a lot of people are shorting the ETF, it has very low liquidity and very few shares outstanding so it might just be too small to have many shares available to short — but I would assume that there’s far more demand to short that ETF now than there is to go long the ETF, it has fallen 20% this year and a bit more than that since it was launched last Fall.)

So, assuming you believe Rickards is right that the Saudi currency is going to be depegged from the dollar “any day now,” what would the investment be? He continually says that it could happen tomorrow, which is why you need to get in on this trade immediately (you won’t be able to after the depeg has alraady happened), but also allows as to how there’s no real certainty, he says it might take them two months or six months to get to that point. So I’m going to assume that he would want to have as much flexibility as possible, which means buying options out more than just a month or two… which probably means he would want to recommend buying puts on the TUR with an August 19 expiration, giving his prediction eight months to come true (there’s also a May 20 expiration, which he might be using as well — February seems way too early, that gives only four weeks to be “right”).

If you’re convinced, as Rickards is, that this will happen, then you would buy puts on the TUR — that means you’re entering into a contract that gives you the option (but not the obligation, that’s why they’re called options — buying them gives you an option, selling them gives you an obligation) to sell TUR at a certain price before the expiration date.

If you haven’t traded options before, it’s not all that complicated — buying a put option means you want the right to sell a stock at a set price in the future, you would buy that option because you think the stock (or ETF, in this case) will be below that price by the time the contract expires. Buying call options is just the reverse, you want the right to buy at a set price in the future, because you think the stock will be above that price. Strike prices that are ‘in the money’ are contracts that would be worth something today — ie, since TUR is at $34 now, the February put option with a $40 strike price is “in the money” and worth at least $6, since you could buy that option now and exercise it to sell TUR at $40. It’s actually trading at about $7, which means someone’s willing to pay an additional dollar over the $6 as a bet that it will fall a bit more over the next month… and the month before February expirations represents not just possible upside, it’s also possible downside — if TUR rises to $36 over the next few weeks, maybe that option is only worth $3 or $4, or if it does rise to $40 the option is essentially worthless (if anyone can sell TUR for $40 because that’s the current market price, no one will want to pay extra for the privilege of doing so).

And you don’t have to own TUR shares to “sell” it at the expiration date, the option to force someone else to effectively buy TUR from you at a set price has value without you actually owning the underlying equity to begin with, you would probably just sell the option back to close the contract when it hits your profitability level (assuming you’re right about which direction the price goes), you don’t actually have to buy TUR and then sell it to someone. Most options are not actually exercised, they’re just bought and sold to open and close the contracts.

So which combination of expiration date and strike price might Rickards be recommending? Well, as I look at them I don’t see many that are particularly compelling in terms of their trading volume (the number of contracts that have been traded today) or open interest (the number of contracts that currently exist), but there are a few possibilities…

May expiration:
May $35 puts (TUR160520P00035000) — open interest over 4,500 contracts, current price about $5
May $39 puts (TUR160520P00039000) — open interest over 4,000 contracts, current price about $7

August expiration:
August $32 puts (TUR160819P00032000) — open interest over 5,000 contracts, current price about $5

I don’t know what the trading volume might have been on those contracts on the day Rickards made his recommendation — not sure what day that was, frankly, but his big live video presentation that I watched which touted this pick, and which drove a lot of questions our way, was on Monday night this week (and he was apparently presenting from his house near the French King Rock here in Western MA, which is just a few miles a way from me — maybe I should go knock on his door). Today the trading volume so far on the August $32 puts is over 500 contracts, and that’s more than 5X the volume of any other contract in the options chain for TUR, so I’ll guess that this is the current recommendation from Rickards.

[Correction: check the comments at the end, I failed to look at a second source for available contracts, and the pick was almost certainly actually the August $30 puts that weren’t quoted in the first place I checked, not the $32s — TUR160819P00030000 has open interest around 7,000 contracts, huge volume of 4,000, priced around $4 currently… and obviously requires the underlying ETF to fall two dollars further, but costs a buck less than the $32s]

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How would such a trade work out? Well, you pay the $5 per share up front to open the contract and buy your option — each contract represents 100 shares, so for one options contract you’d pay about $500 plus commissions (a little higher than stock trading commissions from most brokers, but shouldn’t be a lot higher). That would give you the right to sell 100 shares of TUR at $32 a share anytime between now and August 20, when the option expires. If those options were expiring today they’d be worthless (since the underlying ETF is at $34), so you’re buying just “time value” and hoping that the price moves down.

If TUR is at $32 or above all the way from here into August, and never drops meaningfully below that to give you a profit that you could jump on along the way, you’d lose your money. All of it. The option would be worthless.

If TUR drops by, say, 50% between now and August and is trading at $17, you start to see some real profit — your options contract means can sell 100 shares for $3,200 but those shares would only cost you $1,700 in the open market, so the profit is $1,500. Since you put up $500, you’ve made a 200% return and tripled your investment.

If things are much more cataclysmic and TUR falls to, say, $10 from the current $34, you’ll be cackling with delight as you cash in your $2,200, a $1,700 profit on top of the $500 you invested (a return of 340%). I assume that a minimum of a 50-60% drop in the value of the Turkish stock market is what Rickards is looking for, since that’s what would give the potential for a 300% gain on that options position. (TUR is already down about 50% over the past year, just FYI — the new Saudi ETF KSA has moved generally in the same trend as TUR but is down much more in its young life, it’s down 21% over the last four months while TUR is down 7%.)

That’s the kind of returns Rickards is looking for — big, several hundred percent gains over less than a year as currencies make big moves (and the equities or ETFs that are levered to those currencies make even bigger moves). I don’t know how frequently he picks right with these trades, but he says he sends out a new alert every two weeks and that he has booked big gains of 100% or more on a few of them over the past year, including some big gains recently. Not once in the ad presentation did I hear them say “100% losses”, though they did admit to not being right every time — and if you’re not right when you’re speculating on options, you’re likely to see quite a few 100% losses from options that expire worthless, or that crash in value if a bunch of newsletter subscribers are all trying to sell at once.

Here are some other notes that I jotted down as I was listening to his presentation:

He says that there are always ways to make money, including selling options or shorting stocks, but that he likes to buy options because he’s betting that things are extreme and will get more extreme (selling options, on the other hand, is betting against volatility — betting that things will stay normal). And he says he’s only recommending buying options when there’s a strong possibility of large gains (200%+).

He also noted that they have current open positions with 60, 80, 100% gains, and that they have recently booked big gains of 100% on puts on Goldman Sachs and an emerging markets ETF.

His assumption is that there will be more big opportunities coming because of the flaws in the Black-Scholes model that’s used on Wall Street for calculating the value of options. He thinks Black-Scholes underestimates “black swan” or “avalanche” shocks, assumes they don’t happen, and it assumes that the price adjusts gradually as events hit the underlying security — but that’s not the case, the world is more volatile and you want to buy to benefit from those big jumps if you can predict them.

Rickards says that this “break” of the Saudi Riyal with the US dollar would happen tomorrow, or in two months or in six months. You can see it coming analytically, but you can’t be sure of the timing so you have to be positioned in advance.

And, of course, he says that he likes buying put options because it gives you a lot of upside but very limited downside.

My thoughts?

If you do this kind of trading, keep in mind that “limited downside” just means your loss on any trade is capped at 100% of whatever you put in… which means you have to be mindful of the amount of money you’re putting at risk. The outsize gains come at risk of outsize losses — there will be some 100%-500% gains if they pick the direction and timing right, but there will also probably be a substantial number of trades that result in 100% losses (or close to that). You can’t lose more than 100% if you’re only buying options, so that’s good (your downside is theoretically unlimited if you short a stock or ETF instead of just buying a put option, if it goes soaring you could be on the hook for 10X what you thought you were risking), but the 100% losses can come with some regularity — partly because we’re talking about short time periods of often less than six months, and partly because these are to a large extent “all or nothing” trades made largely based on the analysis of a single person (a person who has, in the past, been wrong about short-term movements in currencies and markets, just like any other person will be).

Which doesn’t mean I’m saying Jim Rickards isn’t smart, or that he doesn’t have intelligent insights into global trends, or that he doesn’t have good, quantitative systems that help him make forecasts. I’ve read some of his stuff, and it’s interesting, and he’s probably often right about currency trends. I just don’t know if he’s got a particular gift for consistently winning long-term 4-8 month options trades — I’m skeptical that anyone can turn broad market insight and analysis of global currencies into consistent wins on leveraged trades.

So keep that leverage in mind when doing position sizing — if you’re only willing to lose 25% of some chunk of money, for example, then only use 25% of that money to buy speculative call or put options and leave the rest in cash or something similarly “safe.” If you’ve got $100,000 but only willing to permanently lose $10,000 of it, then only bet $10,000 on buying put or call options. Stop losses don’t work very well on options, particularly if they’re volatile picks and are “out of the money” — in some cases you can hedge these kinds of options trades, either by placing a simultaneous call option to reduce your downside if you’re wrong, or selling a further-down strike price contract to reduce your cost, but those are also expensive and cap at least some of the potential for windfall gains…. and my expectation is that a successful options speculation portfolio relies on occasional windfall gains to offset lots of substantial losses.

Which is a long way of saying that position sizing is a big deal, and it’s why you should never compare the returns of options trading with the returns on a non-leveraged equity investment — mostly because you’d be crazy to put the same amount of money at risk.

If you make five of the trades recommended by a service like this in the course of a year, at, say, $2,000 a pop, then there is a nontrivial chance that you could lose all $10,000 if Rickards (or some other service) is wrong about the timing or the size of the movement in the underlying stock or ETF. And yes, even if the logic is sound and the quantitative analysis is correct and the position is well-argued, any service is going to be wrong with some regularity if they’re buying options and shooting for 200%+ gains with every trade.

If you have just a couple trades out of those five that give you a 100% loss in expiring worthless, as I would expect happens several times a year for any such trading service, then remember those pesky rules of math: a 50% loss can only be recovered by a 100% gain. Imagine that you have five $2,000 speculations — two of them expire worthless, so that’s a $4,000 loss. The other three, that $6,000, have to show gains of 60% on average just to break even. To get an overall gain of 100% from your $10,000 initial investment, the pressure is on — those remaining three trades would have to average well over 200% gains.

I don’t know what Rickards’ batting average is, or what the record of the service might be (there’s been quite a lot of discussion of the service among our readers here, but I’ve never seen the actual numbers of his historical trading recommendations over the past couple years), so I’m only guessing that a 40% failure rate is not out of line with what some of his readers might see. I could be way off.

So there you have it — Rickards this week has been recommending puts on the Turkish ETF TUR, I think he’s probably recommending August $32 TUR puts in the $5 neighborhood, and, well, that’s all I’ve got. Now I’ll open it up to the rest of you: Any experience with Rickards and his Currency Wars Alert? Any other thoughts on this kind of options buying strategy? Let us know with a comment below.

P.S. On the broader Saudi Arabia/Turkish front, those are certainly hotly debated topics — Barron’s has done a pretty good job of summing up the issues for Turkey’s economy, and there are plenty of people who argue that the Saudi’s will hold firm to their currency peg and remain tied to the US dollar for both strategic and economic reasons. Rickards noted as much in his presentation, saying that the same folks thought the Bank of England would hold firm to the Pound’s value under assault from George Soros et al 25 years ago, too, but they eventually had to cave before they spent all their reserves propping up the currency… and the Saudis will do the same. I don’t know if the comparison will hold true, but there are certainly folks arguing on both sides — though the contrarian bet is probably to go long Saudi Arabia or Turkey right now, so note that it’s what they call a “crowded trade”… which doesn’t mean it won’t work, but might mean that it’s somewhat expensive since few folks are inclined to bet against you.

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Anonymous Questions
Irregular
April 5, 2016 9:38 pm

I am seeing that the May 20, 2016 put
TUR160520P00035000 is selling today for $.28 (-37.78%) and the stock
price today is $43.42. There is an open interest of 4,088. The price
has been increasing from about $34 at the time you wrote the article.
I know there is still time to go before the option expires but does
this price pattern (price gpoing above the $40 strike price) indicate
that there is some type of additional manipulation happening here, in
other words taking value of shares higher before they go lower (trying
to shake out option holders). If Rickard’s prediction was correct
shouldn’t the price have been staying in the neighborhood of $34 or
dropping if he was anticipating a drop in the value of the TUR shares
and an increase in the value of the options. It looks like most of the
value of the option (if purchased in January) has been wiped out,
since you mentioned it was selling for $5 at the time you wrote the
article.

I’m just trying to learn this material so pardon me if I seem
uniformed. The price recently turned down so it might well indicate
that it will end up below $40 by the strike date.

Thanks

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scottMN
Guest
scottMN
April 8, 2016 12:09 pm

The touter recommended puts on TUR near the low of the whole move. That alone tells the story. I have been all over the options market advisors for 5 years and nobody is better than I am using common sense along with 35 years trading experience. If an advisor truly had a system (not a technique) why would they ever publish it? After all if it really worked even 70% of the time, using good loss control, they would have compounded soo much money in their account that selling a service is pointless. I try to make 20% writing options strangles but cannot scale it to giant proportions, like the flashboys.

Travis, best piece of writing I’ve seen in a long time, keep it up, the consumer needs you!

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Mikllee
Member
April 8, 2016 11:18 pm

Thanks for posting. Please go back to coment No. 23. if you can…

i a looking for input about Bill Poulos’ options guidance training.

somebody must have an opinion about Bill’s training. Please share it.

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Dr. C
Member
April 18, 2016 7:10 pm

Down 74% . . . My comments At post 37 still stand- where are the updates – its going to be a one trading day event ???

Dr. C
Member
April 18, 2016 7:12 pm

now down 74% . . . My comments at post 37 still stand- where are the updates – its going to be a one trading day event ??? When do the Saudi’s announce bad news?

Eric
Guest
Eric
April 23, 2016 12:49 pm

Yep, this recommendation by Rickards has been a disaster, at least so far, I am down around 75% and no information about a recommended stoploss that I am aware of. I have taken 5 or 6 of his recommendations and lost money one every single one except 1 where i made 2% profit. Several of his recommendations have ended with 20-35% losses, since he has stopped out of some of them and several active positions are still under water in his recommended portfolio, even. I am afraid I will lose every penny in my TUR puts unless I sell now, but August is still 4 months away. The TUR index is just heading higher and higher and going totally against his recommendation, it has since his recommendation broken above both the 50 and 200 daily moving average. I am cancelling my subscription. I have to say I do like his books a lot, he is a great author but he is an awful investor, at least based on the recommendations he announces to his subscribers.

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hendrixnuzzles
April 23, 2016 1:47 pm
Reply to  Eric

Rickard’s is a very persuasive and readable author with a lot of treuth in his outlook. He made a great call on the macro China/gold thing in Currency Wars.
Just shows you how difficult it can be to translate an accurate big-picture call to a specific investment that is going to do well.

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SoGiAm
April 23, 2016 2:01 pm
Reply to  Eric

I’d never blindly follow any recommendation without DD unless it was for a quick TA play. Trading imaginary money costs you time but not $

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hendrixnuzzles
April 23, 2016 1:57 pm

I am a fan of Rickard’s…but not a subscriber to his newsletter services.
In Death of Money, his big-picture recommendations for protection are Gold…Land…
Alternative funds…Cash…and fine art.

Fine art and raw land are no good for me, although I am in real estate. Gold, Cash, and Alternative Funds still look pretty good.

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hendrixnuzzles
April 23, 2016 2:03 pm

Do any of you guys gambling on Turckish puts know anything at all about Turkey or its economy or politics ? What are you doing ?

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wneils
wneils
April 23, 2016 3:06 pm
Reply to  hendrixnuzzles

Gambling! All on hmmm………RED!

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hendrixnuzzles
April 23, 2016 5:39 pm

Question: unless it’s tied to oil, gold, or another currency that is perceived to have value, why would anyone want Saudi currency ? At least the Turks have some other things of value besides oil and gold one might want to buy.

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hendrixnuzzles
April 24, 2016 9:52 am

Can these be any worse than Rickards reco on the Turkish puts ?
OK guys. If you like Rickards macro view of the world but not his specific option plays you are getting killed on, then why not keep it simple this way:

Rickards likes gold, silver, hard asset commodities, raw Instead of fooling around speculating on Saudi and Turkish currency, why not go for a bunch of Canadian dollars in the Guggenheim fund FXC ? Canada has plenty of stuff we are going to need…mostly of the ilk Rickards says is a good place to park money. Canada’s got gold, minerals of all types, lots of timber and farmland, oil and gas. And by the way, the downtrend in the Loonie coincided with the low point for my gold stocks, around January 19.

Not saying FXC will be good, though I’m interested. Just saying, if you like Rickard’s macro view, then why not keep it simple and close to home ?

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SoGiAm
April 24, 2016 9:57 am
Reply to  hendrixnuzzles

k.i.s.s. is gr8 🙂

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hendrixnuzzles
April 24, 2016 10:15 am
Reply to  SoGiAm

Careful, you’ll become a target for Shi’ite radicals on account of blasphemous
form of speech. They kill people for drawing cartoons, you know.

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hendrixnuzzles
April 24, 2016 10:01 am

Can these be any worse than Rickards reco on the Turkish puts ?
OK guys. If you like Rickards macro view of the world but not his specific option plays you are getting killed on, then why not keep it simple this way:

Rickards likes gold, silver, hard asset commodities, raw land and farmland. Instead of fooling around speculating on Saudi and Turkish currency, why not go for a bunch of Canadian dollars in the Guggenheim fund FXC ? Canada has plenty of stuff we are going to need…mostly of the ilk Rickards says is a good place to park money. Canada’s got gold, minerals of all types, lots of timber and farmland, oil and gas. And by the way, the downtrend in the Loonie coincided with the low point for my gold stocks, around January 19.

Not saying FXC will be good, though I’m interested. Just saying, if you like Rickard’s macro view, then why not keep it simple and close to home ?

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rookaiser
Member
rookaiser
May 20, 2016 8:48 pm

Jim Rickards: The elite’s master plan for global inflation
http://thecrux.com/jim-rickards-helicopter-money-has-already-been-decided/
Basically, more of the same from Rickards.

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quattroluvr
Member
quattroluvr
June 10, 2016 5:42 pm

Travis points on position sizing etc are spot on. Very thoughtful and mature piece re Rickards and options. I’m a subscriber to 3 of Rickards’ letters, and most of the reccos are down a lot – but all but one have plenty of room to run yet. Just be careful with position sizing and stop loss discipline. I need to do a lot better job on stop losses.

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mobilecc
Irregular
June 14, 2016 3:31 am

Travis, what is your opinion on Rickard’s latest venture touting his newsletter on junior gold miners? He claims to have a proprietary stock picking system called MIDAS which will construct the perfect portfolio to make millions when gold hits $10,000/oz. He is partnering with Byron King on this one. He predicts the cause for the pending price rise will be the IMF implementation of a world reserve currency to replace the dollar when the next great crash occurs (soon) as the result of Central Bank meddling. (An interesting statement in his presentation is that historically the result of major crashes has never been “the end of the world” but rather secret meetings of bankers and finance ministers to work out a new monetary system, which of course he “knows” is happening as we speak.) I suspect he may be on to something, judging by the recent jump in gold, possibly partly due to George Soros charging back into gold and the public announcement by Stanley Druckenmiller at the recent Sohn Conference to “sell everything and buy gold”. I myself have been accumulating shares of Pershing Gold, a Nevada junior miner with no debt which is largely owned by Dr. Frost of TEVA fame and his partner Barry Honig, and was recently listed on NASDAQ as PGLC. (Unfortunately it didn’t participate in the recent runup. There is lots of info about it on Seeking Alpha by various bloggers, mostly positive, but they haven’t been producing anything, still drilling and apparently waiting for a bigger gold price). As the old joke goes, “a gold mine is a hole in the ground with a liar on top”. Or is Rickards just the new Wizard of OZ?

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SoGiAm
June 14, 2016 4:06 am
Reply to  mobilecc

Mobilecc, feel feel free to join the Precious Metals discussion with others SGS members here: http://www.stockgumshoe.com/2016/06/microblog-gold-bull-investments-for-the-next-leg-upjune-2016/ Best2U4U-Ben

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wizard1786
July 11, 2016 11:17 am
Reply to  mobilecc

Penny stocks are very labile. You only need one though to go ballistic to make up for other losses.

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wizard1786
July 11, 2016 11:24 am

He does seem to know his stuff. I made a killing off of Brexit using his recommendations. You should only “trade in stuff you know” paraphrasing I believe Warren Buffet, so buyer beware.

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wikiwiki
Member
wikiwiki
October 17, 2016 3:19 pm
Reply to  wizard1786

I shorted the S/P 500 and did well w/Brexit by watching the overseas exchanges plummeting. WHAT was Rickards recommendations? Thanks.

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Fred
Fred
February 13, 2017 6:16 pm

Does anyone have a current comment for 2017?

SUSAN BODE
Guest
February 27, 2017 7:18 pm

Travis, Any thoughts on Jim Rickards latest tout of “D.R.O.N.E.” Penny stocks related to Trump;s plan to up military and defence spending? And have you any guesses as to what his 10 picks are?

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Hans
Guest
Hans
September 7, 2017 7:03 pm

Travis, I just ran into this site and found your analysis of proposed (past) Saudi Arabia/Turkey)TUR PUT option trade recommendation from Richards. In fact I wish I could have seen your article earlier so it would prevent me from loosing 100% of my money in this trade. In fact I have participated in many more of his trades including shorting CAT, DE, FXI, ASHR, EWM, EWW, FXA, FXY, EWY, INDA, FXB, FXE, DXJ, IYT, FAST, DOV via long term puts and aggressive long CALLS on GLD, SLV, and other miners. In fact most of these trades resulted with max loss already or potentially approaching 100% loss at expiration (if not enough time to play out). Jim Richards is a convincing writer trying to time the market reactions based on his theories. If given theories could work out then his subscribers would benefit from his recommendations but sadly majority of his recommendations are causing unnecessary loss of capital; therefore, I consider his service as a fraud and would warn new subscribers to watch out before loosing their hard earned capital.

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