Sprott Webcast

There's a new Sprott webcast from Oct.1 here.

The first 52 minutes are Eric Sprott. I love listening to him talk, especially when he gets fired up a couple of times about a few things that drive him nuts (like talk of 2-5% inflation when he says it's more like 20-25%). In the talk, of course he speaks to the incredibly poor performance of the funds, even though they completely predicted what was going to happen. He's quite convincing as usual in conveying that they are in the right positions, know what they are doing, and it's only a matter of time before they're proven right. He paints a pretty scary picture of the US financial system, and makes a convincing case for energy and gold/silver (their 2 main holdings). His opinions seem a little extreme sometimes compared to what everyone else is saying, but he's a contrarian, right? And how can you not believe this guy when he's always right... eventually. And thats just the problem -- he seems to predict things about a year or two early, and so you never know when the predictions are going to come to fruition.

The next 8 minutes are John Embry (who I love listening to as well), who makes very strong accusations about the gold market being completely manipulated by the government and banks. It will sound very conspiracy-theoristy to most people, but the evidence is quite clear. He makes bold predictions about gold going over $1000 shortly and never returning below that... ever... ever. The new gold guys at Sprott are saying gold at $2000 and silver at $40 within 4 years. It's just very hard to reconcile these views with what's been happening, but you feel the breakout in gold/silver is indeed about to occur, especially with the disparity between the lagging paper market and the current physical market that has the crazy demand and prices we're hearing about. I don't want to miss out on the ride up, so how can I not hold on?

I didn't watch the next 1.5 hours or so.

In sum, they've done a good job of convincing me to hold on to most of my Sprott holdings. I say "most" because I'm considering selling some, after what I saw today. Check this out: Today, U.S. indices up 11%, TSX up 7%, HUI/XAU (Gold stock indices) up 12%, gold & silver bullion pretty much flat. How did the Sprott funds do, you ask? They should be up at least 5%, right? Here are the results... Canadian Equity Fund: -0.1% . Energy Fund: +2.7%. Gold & Precious Metals Fund: +1.07%. What. The. Heck. How is that even possible? I'm too lazy to lookup today's performance of their individual top 10 holdings to see what happened (e.g. one stock down -20% or something). My first thought was that they must have freaked out and have gone to 30+% cash in their funds, but after listening to the webcast today it seems pretty clear they haven't changed their strategy in any way. So I don't know what happened. Today's pathetic, unexplainable performance alone makes we want to sell some to put the money to better work myself... I mean, they can't even make money in their gold & energy funds when the HUI/XAU and energy stocks go up 12%, come on. I don't want to sell too much though, thinking I can invest better than Sprott, because I'm sure I'd be proven wrong within a year.