(From our correspondent Chuck Cohen, a NYC-based fianancial consultant who specializes in gold investments, here’s an assessment of two mining companies that he thinks merit the attention of Rick’s Picks readers.)

Let’s look at two exploration companies which are linked by their being undervalued and by their locations in Quebec, one of the most mining-friendly places in the world. Becanse these companies operate in Quebec, the market will assign a premium to their respective share prices. Plus, in both cases the infrastructure is also very positive, a detail not to be ignored. Please remember that for any stocks I recommend, I suggest that you go to their web sites to familiarize yourself with the companies. Don’t be lazy, but be a student of [continue reading…]

“Gold Is Still a Lousy Investment,” proclaimed a Wall Street Journal headline over the weekend.  Does this sound like sour grapes, or what?  It ran atop a feature by Dave Kansas in weekend editions.  Kansas, who used to work for Jim Cramer, is currently European markets editor for the Journal. We wonder what could have possessed him at this moment to do a hit-job on gold, since it is one of the only investment assets to survive the global asset crash of  the last several years.  It is also one of just a small handful of investment assets that is still worth more than in 1999. Much more, actually. And most recently, no [continue reading…]

Zazi Breathes Life into War on Terror

Americans owe a debt of thanks to Najibullah Zazi, since he has made it far more difficult for Islamic terrorists operating in the U.S. to buy the supplies they would need to make conventional bombs.  Acquiring nail-polish remover and hydrogen peroxide in industrial quantities at a suburban Colorado beauty supply store, Zazi told the check-out clerk that he had many girlfriends. His thick, black beard alone should have been enough to arouse suspicions.  “Oh, that?  I am playing the role of Mr. Abraham Lincoln on the stage of your…

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Credit Card Noose Tightens in Deflation

When B of A spokesman Lawrence DiRita turned up on the evening news not long ago to assure listeners that his employer was willing to work on a case-by-case basis with troubled customers, we decided to call his bluff.  Would DiRita, formerly a high-ranking official in the Defense Department, go to bat for the borrower whose “teaser” loan from the bank was about to shoot up overnight from 0% to 12.24%?  Everyone with a credit card has been offered such a loan at one time or another, and it was once possible to initiate one at rates varying from 0% to 4%, with no additional fee for the balance transfer. Not any longer, though.  Anyone unfortunate enough to have gotten caught with a large balance when the…

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22 Things to Look for When Gold Is Topping

(Gold lurched back into bullish gear yesterday, lifting the spirits of those who may have read too much into last week’s apparently gratutious decline. Before lapsing into despair whenever gold corrrects, as it is bound to do from time to time, we should consider the big picture and ask, Is this the way a top would look?  Here are some of the signs we might expect to accompany a real top in bullion, courtesy of our friend Chuck Cohen. )

No sane gold bug, if there really is one, would dare to pinpoint an ultimate top both in distance and price in gold, but I believe that when it approaches, there will be definite signs to the discerning and pure of heart. The following are some of the signposts I envision as we…

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Mood Shift, Not News, Caused Stocks to Fall

Clueless commentators attributed yesterday’s stock-market selloff to weak manufacturing data and supposed fears over job numbers due out Friday. What poppycock! The pundits would have gotten closer to the truth if they had cited sunspots or unusual seismic activity at Yellowstone. Shares plummeted for the simple reason that they were ready to plummet. Think back to March, when this bear rally began. Since then, when have traders evinced…

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(Gold lurched back into bullish gear yesterday, lifting the spirits of those who may have read too much into last week’s apparently gratutious decline. Before lapsing into despair whenever gold corrrects, as it is bound to do from time to time, we should consider the big picture and ask, Is this the way a top would look?  Here are some of the signs we might expect to accompany a real top in bullion, courtesy of our friend Chuck Cohen. )

No sane gold bug, if there really is one, would dare to pinpoint an ultimate top both in distance and price in gold, but I believe that when it approaches, there will be definite signs to the discerning and pure of heart. The following are some of the signposts I envision as we [continue reading…]

Two Exploration Stocks to Consider

[We often feature the work of our friend and colleague Chuck Cohen, a NYC-based investment consultant who specializes in mining companies. Below, he explains why it is time for those who have been straddling the fence to buy junior gold shares.  He concludes with two specific recommendations that trade over-the-counter for less than $1.]

Rick has asked me to write about gold with a focus on the junior mining companies, so here we go, along with a couple of specific recommendations. I tried to point out the pros and cons of buying the juniors last month, but let me now make a quick refresher. I also suggest that you go back to Rick’s August archives to review my articles on gold and the junior sector.

Advantages of juniors…

– They have been beaten down in price due to the credit squeeze last year….

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Tepid Media Make Gold an Enticing Buy

[Rick has been under the weather with a possible case of food poisoning. Filling in for him today is Chuck Cohen, a financial consultant whose work will be familiar to many of you. The following appeared at LeMetropole.com over the weekend. Chuck thinks that as long as the news media continue to stumble around in the dark in their coverage of the gold world, we should remain confident about accumulating more bullion and precious metal shares for the long haul. RA]

It took a mix of $1000 gold, the media’s reaction to it, and a very fallow day to compose this piece. As serious as the news is these days, it is still difficult not to see the absurdity in what is unfolding. Now that gold has finally pierced $1000, I had expected to find repentance and mea culpas by a news media that has persistently resisted and even mocked the gold bugs for nearly a decade. But if the news over the weekend is an indication, gold might…

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Of Green Shoots and Broken Windows

Our memory stumbles whenever we try to recall any recent sightings of “green shoots” that would support the officially promoted illusion of a U.S. economy in recovery.  Actually, this vision is more of a hallucination than an illusion, since one’s mind needs to venture beyond the pale of rationality, light years beyond the fringe of statistical evidence, to conjure up supposed signs of sustainable growth. Does “recovery” square with the reality that you, personally, see all around you?  Indeed, whatever picture the government and the news media want us to see will be unconvincing at best, since a…

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Will Gold Be the Turd in G-20’s Punchbowl?

With a glower of contempt toward the bankers, gold remains easily aloft above $1000, developing thrust for the next big move. We wrote here a while back that blast-off from $1000 would follow the realization that G-20 can do nothing to restore stability to the world’s tottering financial system. Now, the question is whether anything at all will be “realized” in the wake of the Pittsburgh meeting. We hesitate to call it a summit because the event seems to have slipped off the news media’s radar.  Unable to recall the actual…

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Panicky Gold Sellers Find Safety Aboard Titanic

It’s a crazy world that views dollars and Treasury paper, of all things, as a safe haven whenever the financial news turns unsettling.  Yesterday’s upsetting story had sales of existing homes falling by 2.7% last month, darkening the mirage of recovery in the housing sector. Home sales had risen over the four previous months, but the distress buying that was driving this statistic appears to be drying up. Skittish traders lost no time connecting the dots, dumping gold and piling into dollar assets.  They evidently had…

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[Rick has been under the weather with a possible case of food poisoning. Filling in for him today is Chuck Cohen, a financial consultant whose work will be familiar to many of you. The following appeared at LeMetropole.com over the weekend. Chuck thinks that as long as the news media continue to stumble around in the dark in their coverage of the gold world, we should remain confident about accumulating more bullion and precious metal shares for the long haul. RA]

It took a mix of $1000 gold, the media’s reaction to it, and a very fallow day to compose this piece. As serious as the news is these days, it is still difficult not to see the absurdity in what is unfolding. Now that gold has finally pierced $1000, I had expected to find repentance and mea culpas by a news media that has persistently resisted and even mocked the gold bugs for nearly a decade. But if the news over the weekend is an indication, gold might [continue reading…]

[We often feature the work of our friend and colleague Chuck Cohen, a NYC-based investment consultant who specializes in mining companies. Below, he explains why it is time for those who have been straddling the fence to buy junior gold shares.  He concludes with two specific recommendations that trade over-the-counter for less than $1.]

Rick has asked me to write about gold with a focus on the junior mining companies, so here we go, along with a couple of specific recommendations. I tried to point out the pros and cons of buying the juniors last month, but let me now make a quick refresher. I also suggest that you go back to Rick’s August archives to review my articles on gold and the junior sector.

Advantages of juniors…

— They have been beaten down in price due to the credit squeeze last year. [continue reading…]

Since Chuck Cohen has divulged some of his favorite “juniors” in the commentary section, let’s actualize the information with some buy recommendations based on Hidden Pivot correction targets.  On the hourly chart, there’s a midpoint support at 0.1266 that we can use for now. Bid there, or slightly above, for 5000 shares. I’d suggest keepng the bid out of sight until such time as the stock trades below 0.1300, assuming it does.

Bank Pay Outrageous, But Is That Recovery?

Assuming Americans still have the capacity for outrage, they should be rioting in the streets following last week’s reports that nine big banks paid out $33 billion in bonuses in 2008. The Wall Street Journal put this travesty in perspective, noting that the bonuses were a third larger than California’s budget deficit. “Six of the nine banks paid out more in bonuses than they received in profit,’ the Journal reported, and “one in every 270 employees at the banks – [a total of 5,000 employees] –received more than $1 million.”…

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Bear Rally Looks Eager to Recharge

The S&P 500 Index played footsies with the 1000 barrier yesterday, but bears looking eagerly for a major top shouldn’t rely too heavily on the stopping power of this benchmark. One reason is that Dow 10,000, a marquee number with greater importance, is still 700 points away. We should also mention that at yesterday’s closing price of 9286, the Indoos lay almost 200 points shy of a 9476 target that we flagged a while back as a minimum rally objective. There is also Goldman Sachs, a favorite bellwether of ours that we’ve been…

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Are You Ready for the Gold Rush?

Last week, I explained why junior and exploration gold-mining stocks will be spectacular investments in the impending 21st Century gold rush. I will discuss specific stocks in the weeks ahead, but first let’s talk about how to accumulate them.  Because juniors are quite different from other stocks, the best approach to building a portfolio is to stick with a game plan formulated in advance.  For starters, you should look for stocks of companies that hold the most resources or have the greatest potential relative to their market capitalization. There are some companies that have a $10 million capitalization, with good results and the…

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Options Shrink Risk in Silver Wheaton

Because our immediate outlook for silver turned very bullish recently, we took steps yesterday to protect profits in a key precious-metals stock that we hold, Silver Wheaton (SLW).  It was four months ago, in early April, that we advised subscribers to stake out a small position, buying four September 10 calls for 0.69 with the stock trading around $8. Silver Wheaton subsequently moved sharply higher and is currently trading for around $10.24. The call options rose in value commensurately and were quoted yesterday at…

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Cramer and Abby Help Drive Bull Frenzy

Cramer says commercial real estate has bottomed, and Abby Joseph Cohen evidently thinks we’re in a new bull market. The uncharitable thought, “Idiots!” springs to mind, but neither of these celebrated commentators lacks for brains, as we well know. Abby is simply following a how-to-succeed script that she wrote years ago and which has made her rich and powerful, to wit:  Remain outrageously bullish no matter what the economy is doing, and sooner or later investors will embrace your every utterance as though it were the Sermon on the Mount. She was out-of-fashion and nowhere to be seen in the late stages…

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