Gold Breaks Out...AGAIN
Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance
What an end to the week — Friday’s action confirmed yet another breakout in gold and miners as my 25 Stocks I’m Watching For 2025 continued to crush the S&P 500 this year — now beating the index by an estimated 38%, as of Friday’s close.
I’ll be detailing those positions, and some newer positions I’ve been watching throughout the year, in my September market review — out sometime next week for paid subscribers.
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This past week, I wrote about how everywhere you look lately, the word “premium” has lost all meaning. Airport lounges, once rarefied perks for business travelers, are now just crowded waiting rooms with stale pretzels and weak cocktails.
It’s the perfect metaphor for what’s happening across every industry: companies promising “upgraded” experiences while quietly cutting corners, automating human contact out of existence, and upselling us to death. The service is gone, but the bill keeps climbing.
Every Industry Is An Airport Lounge Now
The same theme of being shortchanged by the system carried into the piece I shared, Trusted Abroad, Blocked at Home. Americans are denied access to nearly 70 medicines that have been safely used for decades in other countries. Canadians, Australians, Europeans — even our pets — can get treatments we can’t. Bureaucracy and profit motives here have replaced choice, leaving patients with fewer options and often worse outcomes.
Trusted Abroad, Blocked at Home: Why Americans Need a Passport for Proven Medicines
On the market side, my two-hour interview with Michelle Makori dug into why investors are about as unprepared for pain as customers are for real service. Fragile markets, warped by passive flows and Fed manipulation, may not survive the next real shock — whether it’s a sudden crash or a decade of sideways grind. We talked gold, energy, emerging markets, and the uncomfortable truth that the “premium experience” in investing — just like in customer service — might be smoke and mirrors.
Fragile Investors, Fragile Markets: QTR With Michelle Makori
Lyn Alden added another layer this week, showing how tariffs — sold as a way to punish foreign producers — are in practice a tax Americans are already paying. Manufacturing isn’t rushing back home the way headlines suggest, and fiscal reality looks very different from the political marketing around it.
The Unraveling Fiscal Illusion: Lyn Alden
And then there’s politics closer to home. New York’s incoming mayor is pushing to erase misdemeanor crimes entirely, as though daily quality-of-life offenses are trivial. If you’ve watched what happened in San Francisco, you know how that story ends. Call it “non-serious” if you like — the results for residents will be anything but.
Zohran's Mamdani's Crime Carnival Arrives
Here’s what else is new on the blog:
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