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As long-time readers/sufferers will know, at the beginning of the new year I like to make some predictions for the 12 months ahead. The bolder the prediction, the more entertaining the copy, though the less likely it is to actually happen. Herein lies the eternal conflict at the heart of so much market commentary. What is more important: getting lots of eyeballs or being right? Today we mark our own homework. We look back at last year’s effort and we count up the points. The scoring system: 2 points for a direct hit, 1 point for a nearly right, 0 for a fail and minus 1, if the prediction is David-Lammy-on-Mastermind-level bad. (For those readers not familiar with David Lammy, he is a UK politician from the “everyone who does not agree with me is a Nazi” school of philosophy, who appeared on one of the UK’s flagship quizzes and was really, really bad). I like this exercise because it demonstrates just how much perspective can change over time. While we can change strategy as events develop, the copy from last year stays and back then things looked very shaky. The stock market was imploding, and the end was nigh. Now it all looks rather better.Next week I’ll put together some predictions for 2024, but here’s how 2023’s batch panned out. Subscribe to The Flying Frisby.* Brent crude oil, then at $80, to hit three figures. We felt commodities would have a good year with China’s re-opening increasing demand. It didn’t. The highest Brent got was $95. Zero points.* Copper would go to $4.80/lb, we said, on the same theme, and we were wrong about that too. It got to $4.30. Not quite Lammy-on-Mastermind levels of failure, but a big fat zero nonetheless. * Yield becomes a thing again. “With choppy, uncertain markets, but sticky inflation, investing for yield rather than capital growth becomes a much bigger theme in 2023.” It seems painfully obvious now, I can’t believe it wasn’t a year ago, but a lot of investors, particularly those with lots of capital, have been quite happy to take safe 5 or 6% yields. Two points.* S&P500. Things looked very dicey in the stock market this time last year. Many were declaring end of days. We said no such thing. It was “a classic recessionary bear market”, we argued. It looks obvious now. It wasn’t then. The S&P500, 3,800 at the time, would get back towards its old highs of 4,800. It has done just that. We are at 4,770. A big fat two points.* Emerging Markets outperform, we said. They didn’t. Zero. * Biotech becomes a thing again too, we said, thinking that after so many years of underperformance, perhaps it was due some time in the sun. Nope. While it has been extremely strong these last two months, it was flat over the year. Zero. (Don’t worry the predictions get better).* European banks have a good time of it too. They did. Up somewhere between 15 and 20%, depending on which measure you use. Even Deutsche Bank is up. Two points.* Bitcoin has a good year. Hard to think it was $17,000 a year ago. ”There are so many reasons to be bullish about bitcoin, yet sentiment could not be worse.” It’s tripled. Two points.* Silver, on the other hand, “fails to deliver yet again.” While many this time last year were saying $30 was on the way, we bitterly observed that “If you can count on anything in this cruel world, it’s that silver will let you down”. It began the year at $24 and, one year on, that is where we remain. $26 was the high. Two points.* US dollar. “Up and down” range-trading was our prediction for the US dollar, and that is what we got. Though the US dollar index ended the year at 101, we tentatively ventured that it would end higher than the 102 where it started. Just the one point. * Central Bank Digital Currencies. Delighted to be wrong about this one, as they are evil. “A nation with a population greater than 15 million rolls out its first CBDC,” we said. No nation did. (Nigeria doesn’t count, as it already had one). Zero points. (Here’s my comic song about CBDCs, if you haven’t already seen it).* Ukraine. Dominic Frisby is your first port of call for Ukraine War analysis, I know. But my outlook was “The Ukraine War will not end before October. There will not be a nuclear war and Vladimir Putin will still be Russia’s president by year end.” Even though Hamas took it off the front pages, it goes on. Two points. * Gold. It “retests its old highs around $2,080. But then it finds a way of being frustrating. It always does. It’s gold.” That is where we are. Two points.* Finally, sports. Man City win the league, I said, and they did. (At that point Arsenal were way ahead). Got that right, but the relegation I got wrong: Southampton, Wolves and Bournemouth were for the chop, but no. Wolves and Bournemouth both managed to stay up. Leeds and Leicester went down. One point.A grand total of 16 points. Not great, but not awful either. Kind of like my school reports.I hope you had a very Merry Christmas. I wish you good fortune, health, wealth and prosperity in 2024. May you make good decisions! May we all make good decisions.Thank so much for being a subscriber to the Flying Frisby. I really am very grateful.Subscribe to the Flying Frisby .Buying gold?Interested in protecting your wealth in these extraordinary times? Then be sure to own some gold bullion. My recommended bullion dealer is The Pure Gold Company, whether you are taking delivery or storing online. Premiums are low, quality of service is high. You can deal with a human being. I have an affiliation deals with them.Live shows coming upIf you have not seen my lecture with funny bits about gold, we have two more dates in London lined up for Feb 14 and 15. Please come.And I am taking my musical comedy show, An Evening of Curious Songs, on a mini tour in the spring with dates in London, Somerset, Hampshire, Surrey and Essex. This is a really fun show.Here are the dates and places. * London, Crazy Coqs, W1. Wednesday March 20th. On sale now.* Bordon, Hampshire. Saturday March 23. On sale now.* Guildford, Surrey. Friday April 5. On sale now.  * Bath, Somerset. Saturday April 6. On sale now.* Southend, Essex . Sunday April 14. On sale now. This is a public episode. 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You can, if you prefer, watch this article in video form here:I was having a coffee with an Anglo-Italian friend of mine the other day, and he began telling me about his grand-parents. They were “contadini”, which translates literally as “peasants”, though the term peasant does not have such pejorative connotations in Italy as it does here. They called themselves “mezzadri” or “sharecroppers”. A landowner allowed them to work his land, in exchange for half of everything they produced on it. The other half they got to keep. Selling that half of the produce was how they got money. My friend’s family had been doing this for generations, never actually breaking above that status to become landowners themselves.There are many parallels to the mediaeval serf, who had to work the land of his lord in exchange for his subsistence and protection. Just as the serf was the descendent of the Roman slave, so was the contadino the descendent of the serf, though contadini were not as subjugated, except by their circumstances.It is not so different to the plight of the young western worker today, particularly at the lower end of the pay scale, who has, by the time you factor in inflation and other taxes, half of everything he earns taken from him by the state, and is unable to buy a place to live. In any case, in 1966 Grandad left Italy and the peasant existence, followed by Grandma in 1967, and they came to work in England. With union law quite protective at the time, most Italians in the UK found themselves either setting up small businesses or working for other small businesses belonging to friends or family, especially in the catering industry. (My grandad, who was also Italian, ran a sandwich shop in Victoria). They were paid in British pounds, and largely in cash, on which they are unlikely to have paid much Income Tax. While the British pound was not exactly a beacon of fiscal rectitude, it was a lot better than the Italian lira, which suffered numerous devaluations and became something of a laughing stock currency. This meant that the money Grandad and Grandma were paid in kept its value, at least on a relative basis.Several years passed. My friends’ grandparents worked hard and saved. Then in 1970 they went back to Italy and bought themselves an apartment. It may only have been an apartment, but for the first time in the family’s history they owned property. They carried on working in the UK and by 1976 they were able to buy some of the land on which they had previously been contadini. Their social status had changed - from peasant to landowner.It was a common thing among Italian emigrants throughout the 20th century. When they went back home, they had so much more money than those who had stayed.They hadn’t had particularly good jobs in England. They were waiters. They were only able to do what they did for two reasons: one, the money they were paid in and saved in was so much stronger than the Italian lira; two, operating in the cash economy and receiving much of their income in tips, which were not taxed back then, they did not have 50% of the produce of their labour confiscated, whether by landowner, lord or state.There is an important message to this story, both about how society works and about how you should position yourself.The unspoken crime of the 20th and 21st centuriesActually, there are many crimes, let’s just say this is a big one. Not only are workers fleeced by the amount of tax that they have to pay (most of which is then wasted on government incompetence or worse), they are fleeced because the money they are paid loses its value.  Owning property has been one of the few ways by which ordinary people have been able to protect themselves against the extraordinary currency debasement of the 20th and 21st century. As I constantly argue, property prices are a functon of money supply, and property is unaffordbale as a result of relentless money supply growth. So much newly created money goes into property, that houses have become financial assets, an effective hedge against currency debasement. As house prices have gone up, it feels like wealth has been created, but it is just an illusion. All that has happened is that property owners have been had that part of their portfolio shielded from the debasement. Storing your wealth in property proved a much better place to keep it than cash, be it sterling, lira, euro or dollar. Plus your main home goes untaxed, so you don’t get fleeced that way either.My Italian friend described his confirmation some 35 years ago. One family member gave him a gold sovereign. Another gave him twenty newly minted pound coins, which my friend still has in the original packaging. Which has kept its value? Those pound coins might have some collectors’ interest, but £20 buys you a heck of a lot less now than it did 30 years ago. The sovereign meanwhile has kept its purchasing power, as gold always does.When you work, you expend energy. The money you are paid for your expended effort is in effect stored energy to be used at some later stage. It is essential to an honest and functioning society that that expended energy keeps its potential. But it doesn’t.What can we do? We can’t change the system. But we can change ourselves.Consider all the work that you have done over the years. Imagine if you had converted what you were paid for it straight away from fiat into strong currency - be it gold or house. The value of your labour would have been preserved too, instead of eroded. With the cumulative savings, you’d be able to turn around today and buy things that were previously out of your reach, just as my friend’s grand-parents did.Now imagine that for all the work you’ve done over the last 10 or 15 years you had been paid in bitcoin. Or, on being paid in fiat, you had immediately converted the money into bitcoin. You would be extraordinarily wealthy now, so wealthy your entire social status would have changed. There are many who have done that. They converted their salary into bitcoin as soon as they were paid. Because they saved in a strong currency, they are now able not to work at all, if they don’t want to. They could probably buy the company they worked for. They can buy houses in a market that is otherwise affordable. There is a whole movement of people who are doing just that now. They will transform their lives as a result.Weak money weakens youYou will not change your life or your status, if you keep your wealth in crap currency.  Crap currency keeps you down. It makes you weak. Crap currency is a way of keeping people down. Many will think this is deliberate, a tool of suppression. It certainly used to be. Serfs were not allowed to handle gold or silver specie, once upon a time. Fiat has a similar effect, though by the back door.There are some economists who argue that it is good to have a weak currency. A weak currency attracts investment they say, especially from overseas. It might well attract investment, because people with stronger currencies can buy you and your country, you and your country’s labour and assets on the cheap. Why do you think so much of the UK is now foreign owned?Europe and the UK both look so cheap to Americans at the moment, because of the relative currency strength. I have American friends who tell me they thought London was supposed to be expensive. It is if you live here and you are paid in pounds, but if you have a strong currency it isn’t.A weak currency makes you weak. A weak currency makes your country weak. Switzerland has maintained the strength of its franc. Ordinary Swiss people have status, as result - a status that is above the status of someone from somewhere with joke money. There is a hierarchy among nations. It comes with the currency.  With a weak a currency you lose status globally, you fall down the global hierarchy. Imagine being an Argentine or a Venezuelan or a Turk. Argentina was once one of the richest countries in the world. Venezuela was extraordinarily wealthy in the 1980s. The Turks were once the Ottomans. Now they are all low status. Italy used to be the richest country in the world, as did Britain later on. With the serial devaluation of its lira, it became a laughing stock. The UK has become a weak nation, a nation in decline. Our money is weak. One of the first jobs of government should be to protect the value of the currency, because then you are protecting the value of your citizens’ labour. By defending your currency, you are defending your people. You are empowering them. But when your currency is weak, you weaken your people. Inflation is not just theft, it is debilitating. It is stealing from your people, weakening them, devaluing them, and taking away their power.The take-away from of all of this: save in strong currencies. You might live in a country with a weak currency. Not all of us cannot up sticks and go and live in Switzerland or El Salvador. But you can still convert your weak currency into strong, be it gold or bitcoin.Save in strong currencies. Over time it will change your life. And your social status.My friend, meanwhile, finds himself unable to buy a property in the UK. He has recently taken a leaf out of his grand-parents’ book, and emigrated, at least digitally: he’s putting everything he earns into bitcoin. Let’s see how he gets on.If you are considering buying gold, my recommended bullion dealer is The Pure Gold Company, whether you are taking delivery or storing online. Premiums are low, quality of service is high. They deliver to the UK, US, Canada and Europe, or you can store your gold with them. I have an affiliation deal. More here.Here is my latest piece on bitcoin, and my guide.If you are looking for Chrissie pressies and stocking fillers, then here is your place. This is a public episode. 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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theflyingfrisby.comIt is now almost 15 years since Satoshi Nakamoto announced his new invention, bitcoin, to the world. Since then it has grown and grown.  Like most things online, bitcoin has divided people. It has its admirers and it has its detractors. They argue with as much vitriol as the political left and right. But the admirers have won: if bitcoin was going to die, it would have died by now. It hasn’t. It’s thriving. It has more than 100 million users and its market cap is roughly $750 billion.The most common reason I hear for not wanting to invest is, “I don’t understand it.”So what is bitcoin? It is a new system of digital money for the internet. You might call it cash for the internet.Unlike pounds or dollars, this money is not issued by a government. Instead it is issued by an international network of computers, according to an open source protocol. There is no government involvement in bitcoin. It is apolitical money. Its value is determined by the market: what people are prepared to buy it for.Then people demand to know how it works. Fine. You explain the blockchain, decentralised ledgers, the problem of double spending, Byzantine generals, mining and all the rest of it, and a glazed look comes into their eyes. They go away shaking their heads and decide they don’t understand it.Most people don’t know how the combustion engine works. They still use cars and buses. Most people don’t know how hypertext transfer protocol works. They still use the World Wide Web. Most people don’t understand what simple mail transfer protocol is. They still send and receive emails. Almost everybody, including the Governor of the Bank of England, does not understand how our modern system of money, banking and credit works. I struggle to find a single politician who can explain how money is created. We all still use money. You do not need to understand how it works in order to use it. All you have to understand is that it does work.Bitcoin does work. As I say, if it didn’t, it would’ve died by now. But it hasn’t. It’s thriving.To give you an idea just how robust bitcoin is, the network is more powerful than the world’s top 500 supercomputers combined. The protocol has been studied and verified by about a gazillion nerds. The technological superiority of bitcoinOne thing that distinguishes this apolitical money from pounds or dollars or euros - money issued by government - is that there is a finite supply: 21 million coins. Governments cannot tinker with bitcoin’s money supply with political objectives in mind and create more of it. A finite and limited supply means bitcoin’s value is likely to increase, unlike the purchasing power of government money, which decreases as more and more of it gets created. (If you dispute this, ask yourself what a pound buys you today compared to ten, twenty or fifty years ago).Each coin is divisible to 8 decimal places. The smallest denomination is the satoshi or sat . There are thus 100 million satoshis to a bitcoin. A dollar would be around 2,500 sats. A penny would be about 35 sats, one cent about 25 sats. This means you can send micropayments which amount to 1/35th of one penny. Try getting a bank to process a payment of that size.Micropayments open up so many possibilities for economic growth.Imagine if, instead of getting a like for your YouTube video or Twitter, Insta or Facebook post, you got a sat. A meaningless amount to the person paying it. But a million sats instead of a million likes would be over $400. Not bad. Micropayments will dramatically enable the internet of things. It is a huge growth area. The Internet is, broadly speaking, a borderless medium. I can communicate with pretty much anyone in the world instantaneously, as long as they have an internet connection. But if I want to cross borders in the real world, this is a time consuming process, requiring visas and passports and security checks and all the rest of it. If I want to send money to other parts of the world, this too can be a burdensome process, requiring forms, forex conversion, customs declarations, money laundering enquiries, and goodness knows what else. If I wanted to send a payment to someone else in the world of, say, 10p it is just impossible. This limits the possibilities of government money.Government currencies are also limited by national borders, by population and economic size. Even the US dollar, which is the reserve currency of the world, is limited. Try opening a US dollar account outside of the US. It is problematic. If you are living in remote, rural Africa or Asia, it is well nigh impossible. It is hard enough, getting a bank account in your own currency. But with bitcoin, you can send to anyone anywhere, huge value transactions or tiny value transactions, and the transfer is frictionless and almost instantaneous. Technically, it is a superior form of money to government currency. It is backed, as I say, by a rigorous computing system and not by the whims of central bankers and politicians who have other agenda in mind than maintaining the soundness of their money. Their careers not least.So we are talking about a technically superior form of money, the purchasing power of which is likely to increase rather than decrease, which has far greater scalability. Why use something like the pound as a savings vehicle, then? It has lost a third of its value to inflation just since 2020. With the potential of bitcoin to become the default medium of exchange on the Internet and in the Internet of things, and with its potential for it also to become the default savings vehicle of the Internet - both for individuals and for corporations - the potential of bitcoin is simply immense. Why would you not want to have some exposure to something with such extraordinary potential?For me, the risk is not owning bitcoin. The risk is surely not owning it. How to investThe UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, in its lack of wisdom, makes it very difficult for UK citizens to buy and invest in bitcoin. However, there is a means by which you can get exposure through a regular broker, and quite legitimately, without having to go down the rabbit hole of exchanges, wallets, cold storage and all the rest of it. You can let somebody more competent and experienced than you do all the heavy lifting for you. You can buy it in your ISA, your SIPP or your regular brokerage account, FCA or not.

Good Sunday morning to you,Today’s piece is all about decision-making and the decline of family in the west.Before I crack on, I just wanted to flag a couple of things.Wearing my comedy hat, I’m taking An Evening of Curious Songs on a mini tour in the spring - shows in London (Crazy Coqs), Somerset, Surrey, Essex and Hampshire. Tickets make great Christmas pressies, so please take a look.And my new album, It’s ALL True, is out. CDs also make great Christmas pressies for errant uncles, so check that out too in the DF shop.So to today’s piece - Why so many bad decisions?I’ve recently been looking at my family tree on one of those ancestry websites, and I was amazed to see just how big some of the families were in 19th and early 20th Century England. Having nine or 10 brothers and sisters was not unusual.Today, families are much smaller. All sorts of reasons have been proffered for that. Matt Ridley argues that families get smaller as people grow wealthier and live longer. In poorer countries, you might have lots of children, knowing that a significant number will not make it through pregnancy, childbirth and early childhood, let alone the teenage years. With the longer safer lives we now have in the west, you can have two or three kids and know that the likelihood is that they will make it safely to adulthood. Stat of the day: in 1850, life expectancy in Britain was 40 for men and 42 for women. Today it is double that. Be grateful you are alive in Britain today - you get to live twice as long.But when parents themselves are asked why they don’t have more children, the most commonly given reason is cost. People ca no’t afford to have more kids. The biggest expense of bringing up a child - government aside (the state takes half of everything you will ever earn) - is somewhere to live. We can no longer afford to buy the large homes our Victorian ancestors built to house their families, so just putting a roof over their head is problem enough. I’ve written endlessly about house prices being a function of cheap, debt-based, fiat money, and it’s quite easy to, therefore, attribute declining family size to fiat.The average cost of raising a child to 18 is now over two hundred grand. Add in school fees and you can double that number. To age 18, you say. Most kids now stay at home well into their 20s. If you look at who has big families today, it is most unusual to see an ordinary middle-class family with five or more kids. It tends to be only the very rich, who can afford it, the very poor, who get state aid and thus can also afford it (especially if housing is covered), or the very religious. On that note, my friend Simon Evans argues, and I’m paraphrasing, that we have smaller families because religion has died. One primary purpose of religion is to get you to reproduce, he suggests. Without religion egging us on, many of us will take the sex, but we might forego the added burden of having to bring up the ensuing children.There’s probably something to all of these explanations. But, whatever the cause, families have got much, much smaller. That is indisputable.My parents divorced when I was just a few months old. I hardly saw my father at all when I was young due to various court rulings, and that led him to set up an organisation called Families Need Fathers. He wrote about his divorce at great length and to considerable acclaim. My mother worked and I went to boarding school. So I never grew up with lots of brothers and sisters or a big family. It’s a life I’ve never known, without wishing to sound sad, one I’ve always wanted and wished for. How I would love to have been one of HE Bates’ Darling Buds of May (I imagine we all would, though tral life is never as idyllic as fiction).I only ever knew one of my grandparents, the other three died either before or shortly after I was born. That’s that life expectancy thing again. So I’m always quite envious when I see, for example, those Asian families with several generations - nanny and grandad, mum and dad and the kids, and perhaps even their kids - all living under the same roof. I know it’s crowded, but it’s also kind of idyllic, particularly if you have a big enough house. When I travelled round Latin America, I adored those large Spanish Colonial homes built around a courtyard. Different parts of the family could occupy different apartments, so they had some privacy, but at the same time they were always close together.I once to listened to an audiobook about willpower and decision-making. I’m afraid I can’t remember the name. (This always happens to me with kindle and audiobooks. You don’t look at the cover every time you open it to remind you, so you forget what it is you are reading or listening to). Nevertheless, the author argued that we make different decisions when we are being monitored. For example, if you believe in God and you believe God is all-seeing, the decisions you make will be informed by that. You will be less likely to sin, for example, if you think God is watching. The same applies to CCTV. Similarly, if you have a large family about you, they monitor and look after you, you are answerable to them, secrets are harder to keep, and that informs the decisions you make. This is, especially, the case when choosing a partner. Old school families will even have made that choice for you - and they will have often looked for different qualities than you might look for. They are bound, for example, to be thinking more about the long-term good of the family, stability, family alliance, the likely durability of the relationship, the sort of characteristics in a partner that might be good for you - that kind of thing - rather than hotness factor, which might be your main priority, certainly as a young person. Broadly speaking, a decision taken by someone with a strong family infrastructure around them , where brother, sister, mum, dad, uncle, aunt, nan and grandad all have some input, and so their cumulative wisdom is all added, is, more often than not, going to be a better decision than one made by somebody with no family around them .As you know, the Great Decline of Britain and Western Europe is something that preoccupies me a great deal. I wonder how it is so many bad decisions seem to be made at every level of society, particularly at the top. And such short term decisions too. (I’m not saying I only make good decisions, by the way. I make bad ones. Lots of them). But I would like to venture a possible explanation: the decline of family. We make more bad decisions without the added wisdom that comes with the infrastructure of family around us. If you extrapolate that from the personal all the way up through society to a national level, the same dynamic is in place.So the tentative conclusion of this article is this: the decline of family has led to worse decision-making at every level of society.How now to explain the decline of family?I blame high house prices. And I blame high house prices on fiat. Therefore: fiat leads to bad decision making at every level of society.And, by the way, I’m sure declining family size also explains the west’s inability to defend itself, its culture and and its history.The Flying Frisby is made possible by you, the reader. Please consider becoming a subscriber. This is a public episode. 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This post now in video form This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

This post in video form This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

Good Sunday morning to you,Last week’s thought piece on the inexorable rise of the Far Right has become my most read Substack ever. Check it out, if you haven’t already.Today we continue on a similar theme.Enjoy!I’m currently working on a new book about gold, and, as gold often leads to war - or is it the other way round? - I’ve found myself reading rather a lot about conquerors and conquest. There are certain things all conquerors do, from invade to plunder to strip the conquered of their wealth, power, history and identity. What is so bizarre about today in Britain and Western Europe is that we are doing all these things to ourselves, voluntarily. Let me explain.As the armies of Alexander the Great marched east, overpowering all who stood in their way to form probably the first great empire the world had ever known and, in terms of land mass, one of the biggest (even to this day), the annihilation of the cultural identities of those they conquered soon followed. Locals were raped, pillaged, subjugated and enslaved. Coinage was a far more important tool of propaganda then than it is now, and Alexander had his armies confiscate gold and silver bullion everywhere they went; melt it down and then re-struck with Greek gods: Athena, goddess of wisdom and war; Nike, goddess of Victory; Zeus, god of power; and Heracles, god of strength, portrayed in the likeness of Alexander himself (at this point rulers had not yet started depicting their own heads). Conquered people quite literally had their own history and legend struck off. Alexander’s coins meanwhile were standardised throughtout his empire.As well as “Romanizing” the Celts - imposing Roman language, law, custom and governance on them - the Romans actively persecuted Celtic druids and destroyed their sacred groves. After William I conquered Britain, he took Anglo-Saxon land and gave it to his cronies; he imposed heavy taxes, strict laws and a new kind of feudal system; he replaced Anglo-Saxon English with Norman French in the courts and other centres of rule; he made ecclesiastical changes to better control the church. Any kind of rebellion met with swift and ruthless repression. Even if 1,000 years later, World War Two was not so different. Both the Nazis and the Japanese did everything in their power to strip those they conquered of their cultural identity.As well as possession of land and confiscation of wealth, the annihilation of local history, myth, hero and legend has always been a tool of the conqueror, part of the suppression and subjugation that follows invasion.  Even today the US, not technically an empire and forever trying to distance itself from anything imperial, nevertheless controls much of the globe and its prime resource, oil, with its military. It also exports its culture in such a domineering way that everyone else confuses their own history with that of the US. Like its military, American cultural narratives dominate the world, and distort everybody else’s. You would think, for example, that there had never been any slavery in history, except for that in America, in the 200 years from when the nation was formed to its outlawing in 1865, never mind that the British outlawed it 2 generations earlier. In fact, slavery has existed since before civilization began and still goes on today, with some 21 to 45 million trapped in it. In just seven years between 1938 and 1945, Germany enslaved a number equivalent to 400 years of Transatlantic Slave Trade. Include Japan and the number is double. American cultural narratives dominate.But here is what is so weird about what is happening today, under the rudderless leadership that is representative social democracy. In the past if you wanted to occupy the lands of other people, you would have to conquer them and take their lands by force. Today no such force is required. In fact, in Britain, Tony Blair actually legislated for it. So did Boris Johnson. Not only do we import our own invasion, we actually subsidise it. The £8 million a day spent housing illegal migrants in hotels is just one example of this.Once imported, we then start re-writing our own history or apologising for it; from positive discrimination in the media to invisible casting (for some but not all) we change of our stories to better represent these new people, both at the expense of the locals and opportunity for them and at the expense of truth.Here, for example, is what, according to the BBC, an English family in Roman Britain looked like. The latest nuts example from the BBC. The plague was clearly racist. With headlines like that, we satirists are being put out of a job.We all know about the anti-white middle-aged man narrative of recent years - pale, male and stale and all that - and the discrimination he now encounters when attempting to find work. We have all seen how the modern British family is represented in advertising: there is, it seems, no such thing as a non-multi-cultural family. The latest evolution is anti- young, blonde women. I know this because my partner works in advertising. There is now a widespread agenda not to have them in adverts.It is not even the immigrants to this country who are actively stripping us of our history and thus cultural identity (with a few exceptions). We are doing it to ourselves. I won't say voluntarily, because there are a lot of people who don't want this to happen, but such is the system of rule we have in place, with state-planned everything and the mindset of the state and most institutions dominated by one worldview, anyone who opposes may as well howl at the moon. A king would represent his people. He can make decisions quickly. His decisions, when they come, are acted upon. With representative democracy every decision is seemingly made with short-term headlines in mind, and rarely legacy. Decisions are often so contested the resulting legislation is watered down, or undermined by the Blob enacting it. Much of the time there is no decision at all because of the imagination required or the career risk of putting your head above the parapet. We are no longer one people with one common memory. We are a splodge, a mishmash of different cultural identities with, following the death of Christianity, no coherent ideology at its core beyond the new religions of climate change, multi-culturalism (whatever that means) and the NHS. It is a system bereft of thought for the future, bereft of strategy and long-term planning of any kind. The Victorians thought with legacy in mind. They built for the future. Today we do no such thing. We build with nothing in mind but short-term profit and the satisfaction of arbitrary building regulations. This will not change until we change our system of rule. The simplest, most bloodless way to do this is to change our systems of money and tax. You design a society the way you tax it. We must have independent money that no body has the power to create at no cost to itself. A non-bloodless alternative - in other words some kind of violent revolution - is not possible, because the state is armed and you, the citizen, are not. This mismatch dooms not just the UK but all of Western Europe. There will not be a revolution.What’s more, the state - the police and the media especially - does not treat people equally, something former Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, articulated to her cost. So I fear for anyone who does revolt.Those who come here do not have the same history as us. They do not have the same experience or collective memory, the same shared values, the same background or the same heritage. Theirs may be superior. Theirs may be inferior. It does not matter. The point is they do not feel the same allegiance or the same loyalties. They do not have the same values or the same goals, nor should we expect them to. They do not come here to be British. They come here to seek their fortune. That is quite natural. That is what people do. That does not mean we need to sacrifice ourselves.We are doing the conquerors’ job to ourselves.I sometimes think that China with its lofty ambitions of world dominance must look at the west, and, every time it is thinking of doing something, then think, “Actually no, we don’t need to do anything here. The west is destroying itself by itself”. Keir Starmer is doing the same looking at the Conservatives. The hundreds of thousands that are coming to the UK each year are doing the same looking at us. And we are powerless to do anything about it.It makes me sigh. And more.Watch this post in video form. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

Good morning to you,Sunday’s piece on the inexorable rise of the far right and what to do about it has struck quite a few nerves. Check it out here, if you haven’t already.In today’s piece - considerably less political - which was first published in Moneyweek last Friday, we consider the sorry state of junior mining.Enjoy!DominicMining is infamously cyclical. But if ever there was an industry that blows desert hot and arctic cold, it is the subsector of small cap and early-stage companies known as junior miners. And boy has it been blowing cold.Many of the old hands are saying this is the worst bear market they have ever known. Worse than the 2013-15, when junior mining had a near-death experience, following the boom of the 2000s; worse than the bear market of the 1990s that came with colossally depressed metals prices at the end of a 20-year bear market and then the Bre-X scandal. Bre-X was one of the scams of the century. The Canadian gold mining company falsified gold samples from its mine in the middle of nowhere in Indonesia. The stock went up over 1,000-fold, from pennies to a C$6 billion valuation, before the fraud was exposed. Many were defrauded and the sector went into a prolonged depression, starving it of capital. The story became the basis for the film, Gold, starring Matthew McConaughey.Mining needs capital. It typically takes more than 15 years to take a mine from discovery to production. That’s 15 years of drilling, development and mine building with no chance profit in sight - unless you sell your deposit to someone else who then has to find the capital to take it into production. Millions, sometimes billions of dollars are needed. There is no immediate return, there is no guaranteed return. Why invest in something with such long time horizons when you can invest in some tech play that will have its app uploaded to the app store, potentially generating revenue in a matter of months? The gains are quicker and the aggro is lower.A lot can happen in those 15 years developing a mine. The metals markets can change, from supply shortages sending prices higher to glut sending prices lower. The money markets can change - interest rates can go up, for example. The political situation can change - politicians might seize strategic assets or impose windfall taxes, anti-mining lobby groups might block development, ESG narratives might take hold and prevent progress. It might be that after 10 years of drilling you discover the deposit is not quite as economic as you once hoped.The Cycle TurnsMining is hard. Many walk away. Then there’s no capital in the sector. With no capital, there’s no new metal supply coming to market. Then there’s a shortage of metal. Then, suddenly, we need to invest. Then capital floods the sector. It all starts to look rosy again. People make lots of money. Projects that will never make it to production start to get financed. Investors start to lose money. Rinse and repeat.With Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, commodities prices sky-rocketed. Supply chains were disrupted. Russian natural resources - and there are a lot of them - were now effectively off-line to the west. Nickel was probably the poster-child of the parabola. It suddenly spiked from around $17,000 to $100,000. The London Metals Exchange had never seen anything like it. Monday March 7th, 2022, was the date. That was the peak of the market. A bear market took hold. It has left the eyes of anyone invested in the sector bleeding. It doesn’t matter if the metal being mined is base or precious, strategic or industrial, junior mining is in the doghouse. Metals prices themselves might not be that disastrous - gold is close to $2,000/oz. Copper is not far off $8,500/tonne. Iron ore is at $130/tonne. I’ve seen worse. The senior producers - the likes of BHP Billiton or Glencore - are not faring that badly either. It’s the juniors - the development plays, the explorers - that have been slaughtered. There are exceptions. Uranium for example. We need uranium. Kazakhstan, the world’s largest producer, is struggling to get its uranium to market in the west. It has Russia to the north, China, which will not export, the east. Afghanistan and Iran to the south. Ukraine to the east. It’s geographically problematic. For that reason I like uranium and I think it’s going higher. But more than 90% of the mining companies in the uranium mining ETFs will not see any production for at least a decade, probably two. Taking a uranium mine to production is an even longer process than for most other metals. The ETFs might be going up, but the companies within them are drains of capital. The only compelling reason to invest in them is that the value of their resources are perceived to be increasing. I wouldn’t touch them myself. You are better off just owning the metal. Yellowcake (YCA.L), which stores it, is the way to play it.You could say the same for gold. Mining is supposed to give you leverage to the metal. That has not happened. This chart shows gold and the gold miners. When the chart is rising, miners are outperforming the metal. That has not happened in any sustained way for 20 years. The metal has been outperforming the miners. There are so many ways to own gold - ETFs, online bullion banks, futures, spreadbets, CFDs. Why take the individual company risk of a miner?Though, on the positive side, there are signs we are making a multi-year double bottom.If you are buying gold in these uncertain times, consider The Pure Gold Company, whether you are taking delivery or storing online. Premiums are low, quality of service is high. They deliver to the UK, US, Canada and Europe, or you can store your gold with them. I have an affiliation deal. More here.The opportunityThe result of all of this is that there are junior mining companies that are currently offering extraordinary value. I’m not saying that in two months’ time they won’t be offering even more value. That is to say they’ve got even cheaper. They might well have. But in any case here is a selection of four companies that I think have a good chance of doubling or tripling if and when this sector turns up.Two of these are Canada listed. That is where most juniors are based. So if you are foolhardy enough to want to buy any of these companies, you will need a broker that deals in Canadian companies. (I use II, Interactive Investor. They have their shortcomings, but they are cheap. If you sign up with them, say I referred you – frizzers@gmail.com – and you will get a year for free, while I gets a referral fee).Sierra Madre Gold and Silver (SM.V)Sierra Madre Gold and Silver (SM.V) is putting a past-producing silver mine, La Guitarra, in Mexico back into production. A fortnight ago it declared it has dramatically more silver than previously thought. Its mineral resource estimate went from 17 million ounces to 47.4 million ounces of silver in total (measured and indicated). This is a big development. The news came quicker than expected and better than expected. In mining it’s usually the reverse. The market barely shrugged. In a bull market this news would have doubled the stock.Sierra Madre will be producing silver next year. Permits are all in place. The mine reconstruction is months not years away from completion. It needs silver at around $13-14 to break even. The silver price is $23-24, so it makes around $10 profit on each ounce. (It will end up being lower than that. It always is. But you get the point). The mine’s previous production was 1 to 2 million ounces per year. Sierra could produce at higher rates than previously anticipated given the increased resource, but even at the previous rate Sierra will make US$10-20m per year, which, for a US$36m market cap company, is pretty compelling. Anticipated production rates are: 800,000oz in year one, 1.3m oz in year 2, then 1.6m, 1.75m and 2.2mn by year 5. There is also potential to increase the resource when it drills out the eastern part of the property.It is going to need to raise several million in the next few months, but CEO Alex Langer has that in hand. The next piece of the jigsaw is for him to demonstrate that to a doubting market. Then production hopefully by summer next year. Langer is buying. I have been buying too. Andrada Mining (ATM.L)Andrada Mining (ATM.L) is a play on both tin and lithium. It started out as a tin miner with lithium and tantalum bi-product, but lithium discoveries at its Uis project in Namibia have proved so compelling that the company re-branded itself as Andrada (after Brazilian mineralogist, Jose Bonifacio de Andrada e Silva, who first discovered the lithium-bearing minerals, petalite and spodumene). The lithium story has been suffering a little of late as the ESG narrative has lost its way, but this could prove a globally significant resource. In any case, though not that many seem to realise, the destiny of Andrada’s lithium is in the ceramics industry not batteries. Management is young and ambitious. The company is producing tin at profit. We are waiting for news on a big catalyst for the stock, which is its partnership with a “strategic investor”. There are, we gather, numerous applicants but this is a conversation that has been going on a long time. It’s a 5p stock. It could easily be 10 or 15p if this deal comes off.Tharisa PLC (LSE.THS / JSE:THA)Another cheap London-listed mining play is Tharisa PLC (LSE.THS / JSE:THA), which now has a market cap below £200 million. It has suffered because platinum group metals (PGMs) have been so out of favour, though it also produces significant amounts of chrome, which it ships directly to China at considerable profit, from its eponymous Tharisa mine in South Africa. Tharisa alone supplies around 10% of China’s annual chrome demand, and chrome prices remain strong. The company has US$127 million in cash, and cash on hand of US$269 million including debt of US$142.2 million. Its dividend yield is currently around 9%. The money is to construct its Karo project in Zimbabwe, but weak PGM prices mean it has delayed development by a year, which is unfortunate. Even without Karo, which the market appears to have deemed a liability not an asset,  earnings per share for this year are roughly 32p, putting it on a PE of 2. Next year those earnings will be lower if the slide in PGM prices continues, so EPS will be lower. Then again PGM prices could rise. By the time Karo is producing you could be looking at a company with 400,000oz per annum of PGM and 2m tonnes of chrome production with decades of mine life. Huge. The market hates it. But it’s a bargain. If you are prepared to take on the risk of, one, South Africa and, two, mining.Moneta Gold (ME.TO)Oh, Moneta. Like an errant lover that promises heaven and delivers only heartache.Moneta is developing the largest undeveloped gold project in North America - the Tower Gold project - near Timmins, Ontario. Its mineral resource estimate (MRE) showed it has 12.8 million ounces. With a market cap of C$100m, that means its gold is currently priced at US$6/oz. It is not unheard of for companies in such mining friendly jurisdictions to trade at ten times that. For example, nearby Marathon Gold, which has around 4m oz, has just last week been taken out by Calibre Mining, for an equivalent of around $60/oz. But, with all the successful step-out and infill drilling that has taken place - it has put out something like 16 positive news releases in a row - that resource estimate is going to increase to, in my view, somewhere above 15m oz. But this is a huge project, a low-grade bulk deposit, and it needs bucketloads of capital to take it forwards. It also needs a new CEO. Chairman, Josef Vejvoda, is standing in as Interim CEO, while the search goes forward.The investment thesis is that this asset is simply too big to ignore and that a major will buy it. My concern is that this story is so well known now - why has a major not already gobbled it up? UPDATE: Right on cue we have this news of a merger. At first glance, this is not the big take out I was hoping for, but I’ll be back with more thoughts in the next day or two. Final note I’d love to tell you that a bull market is around the corner - cripes, it is overdue - and that these things are going to rocket. I can’t say that. I can say these things are cheap. But we are just going into North American tax selling season, when investors sell off their losers to take a tax loss. That is only going to add to the selling pressure. But the amazing bull market of 2016 began almost on the last day of tax-loss selling in 2015. Let's hope/pray for a repeat. Bull markets in junior mining tend to strike when you least expect them. Often they just happen with no apparent trigger. When they do happen, they happen fast and the moves can take your breath away. It’s often better to book your seat on the bus in advance.This article first appeared in Moneyweek Magazine.Buying gold?My recommended bullion dealer is The Pure Gold Company, whether you are taking delivery or storing online. Premiums are low, quality of service is high. They deliver to the UK, US, Canada and Europe, or you can store your gold with them. I have an affiliation deal. More here.How to get a SIPP, ISA and access to US or Canadian stocksI use II, Interactive Investor, for all of the above. They have their shortcomings, but they are cheap.If you sign up with them, say I referred you – frizzers@gmail.com – and you will get a year for free, while I gets a referral fee.If you have signed up with Interactive Investor in the past, please can you drop me a line at the above email and let me know.Disclaimer:I am not regulated by the FCA or any other body as a financial advisor, so anything you read above does not constitute regulated financial advice. It is an expression of opinion only. Please do your own due diligence and if in any doubt consult with a financial advisor. Markets go down as well as up. I do not know your personal financial circumstances, only you do, but never speculate with money you can’t afford to lose. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

I was never particularly interested in politics growing up. My father was an active social democrat, and I remember him jumping up and down with excitement when the SDP was formed, as David Owen, Roy Jenkins, and Shirley Williams broke away from the Labour Party. Even as a student, I never got interested beyond having a feeling that something wasn’t right. I felt I should be left-wing - that that was the right thing to be, but I never felt particularly engaged, only alienated. My vague understanding of political ideology was that Stalin and the Bolsheviks were far left and Hitler and the Nazis were far right - I didn’t realise Nazi meant national socialist back then - but that far left and far right were actually quite close in philosophy. Horseshoe theory, basically.It seemed actual far right was something that didn’t really exist in the UK. There was Oswald Mosley, but he was a bit of a laughing stock, and the National Front was tiny and ineffectual. In my mid-to-late 30s, as a result of studying gold, sound money and limited government, I discovered libertarianism. For the first time, here was a political philosophy that resonated with me. Government is inherently incompetent, inefficient and inequitable. The more it does, the worse things seem to get. The less it does, the better. “A multiplicity of individual decisions,” to quote John Cowperthwaite, former Governor of Hong Kong, “will produce a better and wiser result than a single decision by a Government or by a board with its inevitably limited knowledge of the myriad factors involved, and its inflexibility.”It always amazes me that somebody who advocates peace, free trade, less government, and, in the case of anarchism and anarcho-capitalism, no government at all, can be sectioned off with Nazis and labelled far right. Far right involves more government not less. To say far-right libertarian, as the Guardian did the other day to describe Argentina’s new president Javier Milei, is surely oxymoronic. Or maybe just plain moronic.At best it’s lazy and ignorant. At worst it’s the stuff of smearing and straw men, and wilfully dishonest. I used to think it’s the former. Now most of the time I realise it’s the latter.I am proud to have written the Libertarian National Anthem, which distils libertarian philosophy. The lyrics read:Arise libertarians above totalitariansOur guide is the mighty invisible hand.Reject state controllers, collectors, patrollers.Our choices are better than government plans.Taxation is a form of theft.Free markets and free trade are best.Free speech, free movement, free minds and free choice.Our actions are all voluntary,Not coerced or compulsory.War we abhor, socialism does not work.No debt or inflation, no stealth confiscation,No pigs in the trough at the gravy to drink,No state education to brainwash our nation,No experts dictate what to do, what to think.We scorn your fiat currency.Gold and bitcoin is our money.We own ourselves and we live and let live.We take responsibility.Life, love and liberty.Leave us alone, let a thousand flowers bloom.How is any of that far right?(If you want to watch the video of the above, which I heartily recommend, it is here). Buying gold in the uncertain times? My recommended bullion dealer is The Pure Gold Company, whether you are taking delivery or storing online. Premiums are low, quality of service is high. They deliver to the UK, US, Canada and Europe, or you can store your gold with them. I have an affiliation deal. More here.What actually is “far right’?Time for a Wikipedia definition: Historically, "far-right politics" has been used to describe the experiences of fascism, Nazism, and Falangism. That’s what I thought. But here’s the problem. They’ve done that change-the-definition thing:Contemporary definitions now include neo-fascism, neo-Nazism, the Third Position, the alt-right, racial supremacism and other ideologies or organizations that feature aspects of authoritarian, ultra-nationalist, chauvinist, xenophobic, theocratic, racist, homophobic, transphobic, or reactionary views. So, basically, now far right can be anything you don’t agree with. The name derives from the left–right political spectrum, with the "far right" considered further from center than the standard political right.Of course, the whole prism of left and right is false, in any case. Authoritarian v libertarian is much more telling, and the political compass is the best scale of all. But so overused is the term far right that the political compass is starting to look something like this.I have argued many times, starting with Life After the State, that healthcare, education and welfare would all be cheaper and of a higher standard, if the government stayed out of it. The internet is the most powerful learning tool ever created and it’s (almost) free. In the context of the times, the Friendly Societies of the 19th century were much better providers of care than the state equivalent we have today. But, somehow, if you argue that state care is no good, and that we should do away with it, people think you are advocating a society with no care at all, and therefore you are a fascist and far right. It’s not about wanting the best care for people though, with them, is it? It’s about control.This week we have seen the election of Javier Milei in Argentina, who is a self pronounced libertarian and anarcho capitalist. His rants denouncing the state are the stuff libertarian wet dreams are made of. I know the purists say he is a WEF stooge. Please. Real life will never as clean as idealists and theorists would like. It is muddy and impure. Take the win. Milei’s victory is a good for the libertarian cause, even if only for the PR it has given the word(s) anarcho capitalist. If his policies start to work, the potential for other countries to copy and for libertarianism to spread multiplies. Nevertheless, he is, as we learn from the Guardian, far right.Then on Thursday, an Algerian migrant in Ireland went on a stabbing spree at a school in Dublin, counting three small children and a woman among his victims. Many Irish people, like the rest of Europe, have had had their concerns about large-scale migration ignored by their leaders, who have set pro-immigration policies in place, for years. They’ve seen increased racial tension, increased crime, especially violent crime and rape, criminals released from prison early due to overcrowding, unaffordable housing get even more unaffordable, while schools, healthcare, transport infrastructure all struggle to cope with the increased numbers. But the stabbing made something snap and Dublin saw the biggest riots it has seen in living memory.Then came the reporting. This was the Telegraph, who should know better.Who committed the knife attack? Was that not violent? Or did it just happen? You’re far right if you are angry kids are being stabbed? The Irish leadership took no responsibility. This had nothing to do with their policies. Instead it too blamed the far right. It was hooligans “driven by far right ideology”, said the head of police. My breath was taken away by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar who as good ignored the crime but condemned the reaction as racist, having no place in multi-cultural Ireland, and pledged more censorship and clamping down of hate speech. “The problem isn’t that Ireland is being flooded with unassimilable, predatory aliens,” as John Carter so eloquently writes. “The problem isn’t that a little girl was stabbed by one of them. No, the problem is that the Irish have a problem with it.”The death of the mediaThe Far Right it seems is now everywhere. Brexit was a far right thing. The Dutch feeling threatened by mass Muslim immigration is far right thing. Argentina, deciding that enough is enough after umpteen hyperinflations, large scale corruption and Lord knows what else, is far right. Even being opposed to the inequitable tax that is ULEZ is far right, apparently - by that measure, Robin Hood, Gandhi, Boudicca, the Peasants Revolt, the American and French Revolutionaries - yes, they were all far right. Both Just Stop Oil and Black Lives Matter are self-proclaimed far left organisations. Why does the media almost never refer to them as far left?There hasn’t been a sudden rise or re-emergence of the Far Right. There has just been a rise in name-calling by a media that operates with dual standards. The name-calling can be justified because the definition of what is far right has been changed. And now people who are unhappy about a child being stabbed can be bracketed with Hitler. Do you remember the Nice terror attack in 2016? A Muslim terrorist drove a truck into a crowd of people celebrating Bastille day and killed 84 people. How did the media report that? This is the BBC headline:Killed by lorry! No mention of the driver, his background or political affiliation. Just the passive voice.But anyone who reacts to murderous conduct by an illegal immigrant is far right.When people are angry because George Floyd is killed and we get several months of looting, that’s fine. But when three Irish kids are stabbed and the Irish get hacked off about it, that’s far right. Such blatant double standards.Here we see “Oxford men”.We all know the media lies and has probably always lied. But it also has to be truthful at the level it operates. This switching between active and passive voice is, effectively, lying and sophistry. When the truth is so obviously ignored by a media too scared to call a shovel a shovel, people will inevitably lose trust in it.Thank God for alternative media, that’s all I can say, or should I say, alt right media. At least there’s a truth to it. Give me a citizen journalist at the heart of the action over a hack any day of the week.I don’t think anyone minds people applying to come to a country, working hard, contributing, being respectful and so on. But they do mind lots of fighting-age young men coming illegally, stabbing people, raping women, exhausting local resources (such as accommodation, education and healthcare) and then being called racist and far right for raising objections. If you keep calling people far right Nazis, they will eventually start behaving like far right Nazis, as my friend Low Status Opinions keeps saying to me. The longer moderate political parties ignore the concerns of those who elected them, then the more they will be driven to extremism. It’s all very well saying the mainstream media is dead. There’s no doubt that it is in decline, but it still has enormous influence. The quicker it dies, the better in my opinion - then some kind of genuine free market can return and replace the  monopolistic media we have endured for the last few decades. I say “free market” can return to the media - maybe I should say “far right markets”.When all is said and done, we are seeing a battle for control of the narrative and one side is losing. That’s when they start using smears like far right. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theflyingfrisby.comGood morning to you from sunny California, where I am visiting my dear mother.If you missed them last week:* Check out my interview with Lyn Alden.* As well as the silver stock with a 47 million ounce surprise. * And, if you are thinking about buying gold in these uncertain times, be sure to speak to The Pure Gold Company.Today, though, it’s the stock market. We think it’s going up. Now could be the time to invest. Here’s why …The tricky month of October, the month of choice for the stock market crash, is now behind us. There was a wobble. A very wobbly wobble. But the blob held. The stage is now set for a juicy rally into year end.November to January is, historically, the best three month period of the year for the S&P500, the index of the largest 500 companies in America, while November to April is the best six month period. We are at the beginning of that run.If you bought the Dow Jones Industrial Average on November 1 every year since 1950 and sold it six months later on April 30, a ten grand stake would now be $1.2 million, give or take.  But if you did the reverse and bought the Dow on May 1st and sold it on October 31, you would barely be at breakeven. That is some difference, particularly when you add currency deprecation into the mix. One option gives you breakeven over 73 years, less inflation, the other option gives you $1.2 million. Don’t ask me to explain why this is. It might be some kind of self-perpetuating, herd mentality thing. It might just be that different people do different things at different times of the year. I swim more in summer, for example. (I know that sounds trite, but you take my point). But there is more. This is the third year of the four-year US Presidential Cycle. It might be because the powers that be are trying to get everything looking hunky dory in time for the next election. It might just be one of those things. But third years are very good years for stocks, the years in which the strongest gains come - one of the reasons I was arguing in January that this would be a good year for stocks. This year has been particularly good, especially in the Nasdaq - I gather it had one of its best first six months ever. In 2019, President Donald Trump’s third year, there was a 27% rally in the S&P500. Prior to that, from 1933 to 2015, the average gains have been 16%, compared to 6% for the other three years. That November-to-April run is even stronger in the third year of the US Presidential cycle.  We are at the most bullish time of year in the most bullish year. The portents are good. It may not feel that way after the October we have just had. October, is almost always the most volatile month. Octobers are often so horrible that nobody wants to buy. That in itself is almost reason to buy. “Buy when you don’t want to, sell when you don’t want to,” is not bad, as stock market adages go.Sentiment models are looking good. Last week’s AAII sentiment survey, which measures retail sentiment, showed 50% bears. Hedge fund sentiment is similarly contrarian bullish: long/short funds are the most defensively positioned in 11 years. Insider purchases are up and exceed insider sales. The bond markets have calmed down. Inflation, as they measure it, looks like it’s calming down in the US too. Finally we got a Zweig Breadth Thrust buy signal. I’m not going to try and explain that technical signal here. Google is your friend. Just know that it is bullishWe heard a lot of talk about an impending stock market crash last month. I’m of the mind that if it was going to happen, it would already have happened. Last week saw an eye-watering reversal and short-covering rally. We can expect a bit of digestion over the next few days, before things get going again.So how to play all this?