Posts by: Glint

Ronald-Peter Stöferle is managing partner of Incrementum AG, responsible for Research and Portfolio Management. He studied business administration and finance in the USA and at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration. On graduation, he joined the research department of Erste Group, where in 2007 he published his first In Gold We Trust report. Over the years, the In Gold We Trust report has become one a benchmark publication on gold, money, and inflation. Since 2013, he has been Reader at Vienna’s scholarium and he also speaks at Wiener Börse Akademie (the Vienna Stock Exchange Academy). In 2014, he co-authored the international bestseller “Austrian School for Investors”, and in 2019 “Die Nullzinsfalle” (The Zero Interest Rate Trap). He is an advisor for Tudor Gold Corporation and a member of the advisory board of Affinity Metals. He is also an advisor to Matterhorn Asset Management. Ronnie is married and the proud father of three daughters. He spends his spare time with his family, watching and playing football, running, and at classical concerts.

“In Austria it’s normal on birthdays or at Christmas to receive small gold coins, e.g. ducats, from your grandparents. The generation of my grandparents experienced several currency reforms and the consequences of two world wars; for them gold has a different value than for the younger generation. I owe them my initial interest in gold.

My professional fascination with gold began when I bought shares in a small junior explorer called “Osisko Exploration” on the recommendation of a friend. The stock turned into a ’40-bagger’, i.e. it increased in value by 40 times the original value. I went to my boss at the bank where I worked as an equity analyst and asked him if I could write a special report on gold. “Gold is always good, Ronnie”, he said, and that was the birth of the first In Gold we Trust report. From then on I started to study the monetary system, inflation, mining stocks and the Austrian School of Economics intensively. None of these topics are taught in schools or at university. Suddenly I saw many things from a completely different perspective.

Since then I have been writing the In Gold we Trust report for 14 issues and it has become one of the most widely read gold studies. They are usually very detailed; the 2020 report, ‘The Dawning of a Golden Decade’, is more than 350 pages long. I am fascinated by gold and everything around it and I am always discovering new approaches, ideas and perspectives”.

Michael Siperco is the senior research analyst for global metals and mining at Velocity Trade Capital, focused on precious metal commodity commentary, thematic senior producer sector research, and coverage of emerging developers and junior producers. He joined Velocity in 2019, after 13 years in progressively senior roles at Orion Securities, then Macquarie Capital Markets Canada. He has covered all segments of the mining industry, from explorers/developers to large cap global diversified senior producers, precious, base and bulk metals, as well as royalty/streaming companies.

“I was born in Canada, but my parents immigrated from behind the Iron Curtain. That meant that from a young age I understood the power and control governments can exert over not just the big stuff, but everyday life. The arbitrary laws, policies and edicts that can change fortunes on a dime, picking winners and losers, separating the rich from the poor, the bankrupt and dependent from the prosperous and free. All in the name of whatever political ideology or economic theory is in vogue at the time.

The chaos of revolution in Eastern Europe and the fall of the Soviet Union 30 years ago put those lessons in stark terms. What people knew, what they had based their lives, their careers, their fortunes on for decades vanished with a few strokes of a pen. Entire financial systems collapsed overnight. Currencies became worthless. Laws and rules were rewritten, or downgraded to mere suggestions.

I heard stories and knew people and families whose net worth overnight became a function of how much gold jewelry, or old coins they’d managed to save. Smuggling kruggerands, sewn into the lining of their suitcases, or trading gold bracelets for apartments, land. I learned the value of gold as barter, and its power as a currency, as a store of wealth beyond the control of any government, central bank, or official exchange ratio. A fundamental building block of human economy, and a truly global unit of account when all else fails. It’s a lesson that many in North America and Western Europe have never learned, or at least never internalized.

Over the last 10-15 years, between economic crisis, changing geopolitics, and of course the global pandemic, a new, overdue, reckoning seems to have started about money and economics, about value and fiat currency. There’s no better evidence of this than gold’s climb to all-time highs, and the emergence of more alternative stores of value including, of course, bitcoin and the cryptocurrencies.

I bought my first physical gold at around $300/oz in the 1990’s, and my first mining stock not long after, in the middle of the (first) tech bubble. When I later married into an Indian family, I started to appreciate the generational transfer of wealth, not in dollars, or rupees or stocks, but gold.

I buy gold today for the same reason. Not to sell it or trade it for fiat currencies (there are plenty of other things to trade), but to hedge my bets, insure my other assets, and ultimately to pass on to my children. As a plus, no matter what other alternatives may come or go, it’s impossible to beat the look and feel of a newly minted gold maple leaf in your hand”.

A ndy Smith is an avid golfer, which he has more time to indulge in now he has retired. Before his retirement he was a familiar figure on the world’s gold scene, speaking at many conferences where he usually delighted in annoying the audience but getting lots of laughs at the same time for his acerbic comments. He worked as a precious metals’ analyst for several investment banks and hedge funds. He started his career as a government economist in the Transport ministry and then at the Treasury, where he honed his skills at spin-doctoring.

“Those expecting an epiphany – the discovery of the one true monetary/moral way a la The Wizard of Oz – will be disappointed. My conversion was slower, accidental, even a bit cynical. And it all started with a Big Bang…

My scenic route Damascus-wards began in 1988 in BP (‘Beyond Parody’, I still think) in a job I loathed. Near my wits’ end, I bumped into an old university chum from the mid-1970s, a Zimbabwean then running Phillips & Drew’s ‘resource equities’ desk. He needed a bona fide economist to provide ballast to, well, the commodity-related BS in sales. Interested? I scarcely paused to digest his hand after I’d bitten it off…

The Big Bang was then rumbling through The City, as London houses were atomised by foreign banks. ‘P&D’ was taken over by Union Bank of Switzerland and I had a choice: slink back to industry, even government, with my now slicker economist skills, or stay and make myself over. I went for the facelift. I wrote to the head of UBS precious metals noting that they, then the biggest bullion bank in the world, had no analyst and, luckily, I was that person. After a presentation in Lugano, at which I’m sure the 35mm slide projector was sabotaged to stress-test my brown trousers, I got the job I invented.

Cue 11 years UBS, 8 years Mitsui, 3 years Ridgefield Capital, 2 years PruBache – so, you can fool most of the people most of the time. It began by poking sticks at the animals, aka clients, the media, conference-goers – for everyone has a view on gold, full-on but more or less half-baked, most seeking affirmation or a good scrap. Indeed, my early years are best summed up by this troll on a gold chat line: ‘when he was circumcised did they throw away the wrong bit?’

This matured into a more respectful co-existence; unique in finance, this thing called gold has a pulse, and even suffers entertainment gladly. A broad church then, as befits a quasi-religious movement with legs. My best ‘enemies’ chose to keep me closer, and we are friends to this day. Along the Yellowbrick Road I’ve tripped through Bernal Diaz, Samuel Pepys, Ayn Rand, and been paid for it. Golden Years indeed”.

P atrik Schumacher is the principal architect with Zaha Hadid Architects, which he joined in 1988. After high school in Gerlingen, Germany, Schumacher studied Philosophy and Mathematics at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Bonn in the early 1980s. In the mid-eighties, Schumacher studied architecture in Stuttgart and in 1987 continued his studies at London Southbank University. In 1990, he returned to University of Stuttgart to complete his Diploma in Architecture and then re-joined Hadid. In 1999, he completed his PhD at the Institute of Cultural Science, Klagenfurt University. Since Hadid’s death in April 2016, he has been leading the firm as its sole remaining partner.

“Ever since the 2008 meltdown I have been suspicious about politically managed fiat money. Such money not only implies permanent creeping inflation, but also the risk of a more precipitous erosion of its value. It’s neither sound, nor safe. Given steady productivity gains via technological progress prices should fall, not rise. Therefore money should not only be safe and solid, but it should appreciate, not depreciate. Gold is a solid, safe and continuously appreciating money. Such money allows us to participate in global societal progress, offering a true social dividend to all citizens of the world. That’s why I like to hold my cash in gold. Glint is the first product and enterprise that allows me to keep my cash ready in the form of gold, and I can do this in the most easy going and elegant way possible. My gold is always ready to hand via my Glint card and app. I love it”.

N  ed is the fund manager of the Merian Gold & Silver Fund at Merian Global Investors, a diversified global asset management firm, which is part of the Jupiter Group. Prior to this role, he was the fund manager of Old Mutual’s Gold & Silver Fund, and earlier was Investment Director at Quilter Cheviot Ltd.

“My gold story started around the turn of the millennium. I had become interested in financial markets on the back of reading about the repeal by the Clinton administration in 1999 of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which separated investment banking from retail banking. Glass-Steagall was an attempt permanently to put an end to bank runs and the dangerous practices that gave rise to them – more than 4,000 US banks collapsed during the 10-year long Great Depression which started in 1929. At its height around a quarter of Americans were without a job.

The repeal of Glass-Steagall seemed to me rather brazen; it gave banks the chance to become very big – too big to fail. I considered the implications and became a financial markets’ sceptic. From there I read a fair amount; Ferdinand Lips’ Gold Wars was the book that had the most impact on me and I still recommend it.

I bought physical metal for the first time in early 2002, and became interested in mining equities shortly afterwards. Gold and silver coins speak to the individual very directly and are easy to understand, so I started there. Looking back, it now seems to me like a fairly natural evolution into a two-decade focus on the nature of money itself.