Gold Symposium Trip

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Back from my week long trip over East and have now caught up on the inbox/to-do. Monday and Tuesday was the Gold Symposium. Good to see a lot more bullion dealers there and a lot of people interested in the bullion investment sessions, in contrast to mining companies which has been the focus of the conference in the past.

David Evans from Gold Nerds gave the same presentation as last year but had tightened it up (click here). I think it is one of the best presentations for people new to gold or why they should be buying gold – its doesn’t hype up the case or is too gloomer and is quite factual. If you have someone you are trying to convince to get into PMs, I’d recommend sending them this presentation.

Keith Weiner’s presentation was also good but I can’t find it on the Symposium slide share site. Other ones worth looking at are Richard Karn, Dan Denning and Rickards of course.

Funniest part was the presentation by the BetaShares guy on their USD hedged gold listed ASX product. I met him before his presentation and said I wouldn’t heckle (as the Mint’s PMGOLD is a competitor) but when he said that the 50% CGT discount didn’t apply to physical gold purchases I couldn’t let it go by with a comment/question at the end. However, I had to first wait for the inevitable questioning about his statement that physical buyers risked a 5%-10% cost for refining/assay when selling back!! He also lost a lot of people in trying to explain how the 30 forward FX hedge worked. All in all it was a Fail, as they say.

I think next year they should have one room for mining company presentations which you can drop in and out of as you see fit (plus it would give them a bit more time) with all the investment in PMs presentations in another room.

At the dinner/awards at the end Jean Kittson was very good with the mining/gold jokes. Also I think Gold Stackers should have won Trader of the Year award and got stooged on that.

Wednesday I went to the Sydney silverstackers lunch time meet up but had to cut that short because had lunch with Dirk Baur from University of Technology Sydney to chat about gold. He has done a few papers on gold, safe haven assets & seasonality – worth checking out for the academically minded, see his section on the SSRN website.

Thursday met up with BullionMark/Ainslie/Reserve Vault. Class outfits all of them and Mark will bring his usual professionalism to the Reserve Vault business providing another option for Brisbane stackers not happy with the outrageous Allocated storage fees of the Perth Mint Seriously the more options for investors the better for the market as a whole – its all about diversification.

Later in the day caught up with Warren from screwtapefiles blog to chat about his Bullion Bars Database project to see what we might be able to find out about the OTC bullion market. Pity Warren has a day job and can’t spend all his time on that work as I think there are some nuggets buried in the data. Dinner later that night with some Brisbane PM bugs of varying ages was a treat intellectually and I was bummed to have to cut the stimulating conversion short due to an early flight out the next day.

Friday was a fly in and fly out visit to Nick of Sharelynx. It was great to meet Nick in person for the first time and we gasbagged on gold for about 6 hours straight and forgot about lunch (but not beer). The amount of data Nick has accumulated since the 1990s is invaluable. Well worth the subscription as I always say.

2012-11-04 07:42:22

Source: http://goldchat.blogspot.com/2012/11/gold-symposium-trip.html