Thread: George Soros sells his gold

Listening to you guys, it seems gold has become too complex to understand. It's like one of those derivative watchamacallits. Things used to be simple to understand at one time. Being a know-nothing like most people in this world, I have to assume that most of the masses buying gold out there are buying it simply because they think it is going to go up. They've got extra cash in their pockets so they buy it. They buy it without out all the complex thinking that the experts here and those like Soros use.

Originally Posted by Hampsha

Listening to you guys, it seems gold has become too complex to understand.

Originally Posted by socal

Find a bullion dealer in Thailand that sells gold bars(not coins) Draft the bullion dealer the money and take possession of the gold.

That's as clear and simple as it gets.

First of all, please excuse me, I really do know very little on the matter.

Originally Posted by socal

Originally Posted by dirk diggler

Lets make this simple.

If I want to buy and ounce of gold I call/go to/logon to _______. I buy my ounce for the current cost and then they will/will not send me ______. Then, if I want to sell, all I have to do is _______.

Thanks.

Find a bullion dealer in Thailand that sells gold bars(not coins) Draft the bullion dealer the money and take the gold.

Ok, simple. How can I be assured it's real gold and not this lead stuff we've heard about? Should I bring a really big guy with me for the journey home/to the bank? Can I pay cash?

Originally Posted by socal

The Eurozone has no tax on selling gold so that would be the best. Just go to a bullion dealer in Europe and sell your gold to them.

Ok, so now I have my wedge of gold, bought in Thailand and the same rate it would cost internationally, right? Or is it cheaper? Why would I pay for a return to Europe to sell it? I mean, after travel expenses for a start.

I would basically just buy it, hold onto it for future resources. An asset if you like. Can't I just sell it back for the higher value when I see fit to sell? What's the deal with tax on selling gold? Surely that's only on profit, but how much percent?

Originally Posted by socal

I wouldn't buy gold if you where thinking of doing a trade with a duration of a year or so.

So a year from now, gold will most likely be fucked?

That makes my think that my best option is buy buy an almost new Harley Davidson. If found at a reasonable price (for Thailand) I can have a lot more fun out of it than a gold door stop. I can then sell it on for the same price, if not more, and buy lots of gold while the price has dropped.

Now, the ultimate question. Which one has more chance of crashing in my posession?

Originally Posted by Butterfly

the best way to do it IMO if you want get all the benefits of Gold exposure is to buy a Gold Bullion ETF

An article of EFTs which some might find useful.

Terry Smith: 'exchange traded funds are worse than I thought' - Telegraph

"On 11th January I published my first annual letter to the holders of the Fundsmith Equity Fund. In it I levelled some criticisms at the investment fad for Exchange Traded Funds (“ETFs”).
One of my basic concerns was that I thought there was a danger of ETFs being mis-sold.
I suspect a lot of retail investors think that ETFs are the same as index funds. Some of them are, but many aren’t. In particular, the performance of short ETFs and leveraged ETFs may diverge markedly from what an investor who believes they are simply index funds would expect.
It isn’t hard to give examples in which investors would lose money on a leveraged long ETF if the market went up over a period of significant volatility, or in which they lost money owning a short ETF and the market went down over a period in which there were some sharp rallies.
The problem is with the daily compounding of ETFs.
Plus many ETFs do not contain a basket of the underlying securities or assets which they are attempting to track. Instead they hold asset swap agreements with a counterparty (often the bank which is the ETF sponsor) which aim to replicate the performance of the index or asset concerned.
There are obvious dangers in such an arrangement in the areas of counterparty risk and collateralisation of the sort which caused so many problems during the Credit Crisis.
A good example of the potential risks here is given by PEK, the NYSE-listed Market Vectors China A Shares ETF. It is illegal for foreign investors other than licensed institutions to buy A Shares listed in Shanghai or Shenzhen. So the ETF owns swaps with brokers who are licensed to hold the underlying shares. If PEK owned a significant portion of the float in A Shares and its holders tried to liquidate at speed it might be interesting.
Some commentators claim we need not worry much about retail investors misunderstanding ETFs as in Europe at least, they are mainly utilised by institutional investors.
This of course misses a couple of vital points. One is that the underlying clients for many of those “institutions” are individual investors - do they really understand the risks their private wealth manager is running with ETFs?
Also the Financial Times FTfm supplement carried an article on 9th May pointing out this lack of direct retail involvement in ETFs in Europe on the same day as the wrap around advert for its supplement was supplied by Amundi ETF. On that day commuters coming into London were being given handouts of glossy brochures on Amundi ETfs plus a natty plastic credit card/season ticket wallet emblazoned with the slogan
“Amundi ETF: More than just another tracker”
Quite so.
At this rate we may soon have to worry about the direct retail involvement in ETFs.
However, there is another and perhaps more pernicious danger with ETFs than misunderstanding or mis-selling.
An ETF is in effect a hybrid vehicle which combines features of an open-ended or mutual fund with those of a closed-end fund. They are like open-ended funds insofar as a purchaser buys or redeems so-called creation units. But they are also tradable in the secondary market, so ostensibly providing real-time liquidity.
Secondary trading activity brings with it the possibility that market participants will short the ETFs themselves. And there is no limit to the short selling, which is impossible in an ETF in the same way that there is in an equity.
In an ordinary equity, the short-selling is limited by the ability of the short sellers to borrow the stock so that they can deliver it to complete their sell bargains. In an ETF a short seller can always rely on the process of creating shares in the ETF to ensure he can deliver.
This leads to the possibility that a buyer of an ETF share is buying for a short seller and that no new share has yet been created.
The investors who buy from the short sellers don’t own a claim on the underlying basket of securities or swap in the ETF, they own a promise to deliver the ETF share given by the short-seller.
The problem this causes is that as no new shares are created in the ETF by this process, the assets of the ETF may become significantly less than the outstanding cumulative buy orders would suggest. This is a significant problem given reports that there has been short-selling up to levels of 1000pc short in some ETFs.
You might think that one way to overcome the risks involved in this at a stroke is for the ETF sponsor to create the shares represented by the cumulative buying interest, but this may be easier said than done.
Take an ETF like IWM in which the short interest recently exceeded 100pc or $15bn (£9.3bn). IWM invests in the Russell 2000 US small cap index. To invest $15bn in the basket of stocks involved would require about a week’s trading – and that is if the ETF creation was the sole trading in those stocks. The scope for a short squeeze is tremendous.
The net result is that across the entire ETF asset class portion of the funds which ETF purchasers think have been invested in ETFs, via the creation of new shares, has in effect been lent to hedge funds. The ETF holdings are not all backed by assets of the sort investors expect, even if they understand what the ETF is meant to do.
Perhaps these little understood structural issues explain why 70pc of the cancelled trades in last May’s Flash Crash were in ETFs when ETFs represent only 11pc of the securities in issue in the US.
Moreover, in the case of some ETFs such as PEK it is difficult to fathom what the short interest in PEK really represents as it is illegal to short China A shares.
Another example of the issues in this sector which recently crossed my desk was a fundraising proposition for a business which undertakes trading in ETFs. It shall of course remain nameless, but it trades, arbitrages and makes prices in ETFs with a particular focus on the less traded ETFs. This company describes itself as a ‘fairly thinly capitalised entity’. There are echoes of the parallel banking system in the Credit Crisis here.
It also describes the pace of development in the ETF area as ‘breakneck’. I just wonder whose neck will eventually get broken."

Not only fiddling in Gold, Soros has his fingers in this latest LightSquared corruption including the Obungler...

• Soros reportedly invested in the telecom company LightSquared through Harbinger Capital Partners (a hedge fund run by billionaire financier Philip Falcone, owns LightSquared)., and many of the nonprofits he finances have backed LightSquared in regulatory and policy disputes....
• Air Force Gen. William Shelton, head of Space Command, testified to Congress this month that giving LightSquared the radio frequencies it is slated to get would interfere with the military's GPS needs.
• Ahead of Shelton's testimony, White House officials nudged Shelton to go easy on LightSquared ... Another government official said the White House pushed him to downplay the GPS worries.
• Falcone is a big political donor who has given exclusively to Democrats and independents since Obama's election. Emails have surfaced showing LightSquared executives discussing donations to Obama's campaign in policy conversations with White House officials. Finally, there's the eye-catching detail that another Obama donor, George Haywood, steered then-Sen. Obama to invest $90,000 in the company (then named SkyTerra) back in 2005 (Martha Stewart missed that particular tip).
• Soros generously funds a huge swath of the liberal movement, and has aligned his business interests with Obama's big-government policies. For instance, Obama green-energy official Cathy Zoi left the Energy Department earlier this year to help run a new green-energy (and thus subsidy-dependent) investment fund Soros was starting.
• In the LightSquared affair, Soros shows up repeatedly.

http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/article/soros-turns-obamas-lightsquared-imbroglio