Calling all goldbugs! How did that work out for you?
A few years back, all you heard about was goldbugs. Gold was the best investment in the world! It was going to go up in value because... it was! And if you couldn't see that, well, you were just an idiot and clearly not spending every waking hour on r/goldbugs!
As the chart above illustrates, the folks who got into gold during the height of the recession (2011) are kind of hurting right now. People who bought in at $1400 an ounce or more are sitting on negative equity, while the rest of us rode the bull market. Gee, I wonder how that bull market is going to do, long-term? Or bitcoin? What goes up, must come down.
What is interesting about these bubbles - and they are bubbles - is that no one talks about them once they burst. People are embarrassed to admit that they were wrong, particularly when they were so fucking smug about it a few months or years previous.
I mentioned before that some neighbors (now dead) were getting into "day trading stocks" back in 2007, before it all blew up. They called me an idiot for buying and holding stocks and mutual funds (among other things). They were making "big money" by purchasing stocks and then unloading them - often within minutes!
They had subscribed to some sort of "day trading system" which may also have been a pyramid scheme, as they seemed to spend more time trying to sell this to their friends than they did actually using it. Anyway, months later, no one is talking about day trading stocks, and when you bring it up, well, awkward silence.
We don't talk about that... change the subject please!
And so on down the line. The people who smugly told me that they were going to make it big in real estate and that I was a fool for selling out, are strangely silent today, much as the Elio "investors" and depositors are - the latter of whom all went out and bought a moped. And sadly, this silence isn't helpful.
Silence is the con-man's friend. Whether it is a scam, a Ponzi scheme, or just a shitty investment, when people clam up about their failures, well, the con-man goes on to live another day and claim another victim. And so it goes with gold. The rabid true-believers are largely gone, and in fact, will never admit to being rabid true-believers in the first place.
Besides, gold is so, yesterday. Crypto-currencies! Now there's a winner that is sure never to fail! And if you can't see that, well, you are as dumb as the gold-doubters were a few years back.
Act rationally in an irrational world.