Quote Originally Posted by BushMasterBoy View Post
India is the world's largest buyer of gold. India's 6th largest city is just about out of water. I figure that they are buying more gold. Military industrial complex is gearing up for a confrontation in the middle east.

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/06/19/i...hnk/index.html
I used to spend hours reading pieces on supply/demand, trying to play the market, and it turned into a massive waste of time. The reason?

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-...why-it-matters


Basically, there is no way all the physical gold "pledged" and traded could ever be delivered. Yes the banks have participated in this scheme to manipulate pricing. This is why the "Glenn Beck bet" never paid off and many I previously disagreed with were right; the markets are 100% manipulated to make sure certain parties always win.

Set up this "rehypothecation" scheme in any other business, or as an avg Joe, and you'll be a felon.


Then there's GLD which I played around with for awhile because it trades like a stock and is easy to bounce in/out of...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/afontev.../#5dcab71857c2

...backed by 40.8 million ounces of physical gold
Sounds cool right? An ETF based on physical holding, small management fee that is paid from said holdings.

But wait...

Even though GLD is “physically backed,” ordinary investors can’t just go to London and redeem their bullion. Only "authorized participants" are allowed to create or redeem shares. Authorized participants are registered broker-dealers or other securities market participants which have entered into agreements with the trustee and sponsor (these include major Wall Street names like Citi, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, and Merrill Lynch-Bank of America, among others), allowing them to deposit either gold or shares in exchange for the other at unallocated accounts until the operation is completed.
Isn't that strange? The only people who can take delivery at the vault are the same people involved in the rehypothecation scheme. So I wasn't buying/holding gold, I was buying/holding a certificate that said I owned gold but could only be verified by the same brokers who could never satisfy delivery of the gold they claimed they held.

Sketchy AF.

In short, I don't think we know the actual physical holdings/supply on planet earth, and I don't think gold's market price is legit. I think we can know something about demand but that's only one side of the equation.