Less than two hours ago, Hunt Gold Corp. provided shareholders with a comprehensive update covering a variety of issues.

Regarding its continued drilling at the “Mockingbird” Dandy Mine, the company currently has two holes planned and will update shareholders as additional drilling and exploration plans are finalized. Drilling operations will resume by TonaTec no later than January 10.

The company reported that a substantial amount of core from the first 6 drill holes at the Great West and the Pocahontas Gold Mines has been split. The core has been shipped to an independent assay laboratory located in Tucson, Arizona. The remainder of the core will be split and shipped this week. The independent assay laboratory has designated the Company’s core samples as a priority project, with the first assay results anticipated before the end of the month.

Although Hunt Gold recently increased its Authorized Share Capital to facilitate any possible deals and

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According to the new book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, countries that have high PDI’s (power-distance index) respect authority more and are less likely to speak up to or challenge superiors. The evidence cited is the case of a Korean Air flight where the first officer (the co-pilot) knew the plane was in serious trouble, but out of  perceived ‘respect’ for the pilot, was slow to suggest otherwise. The result of the first officer’s lack of speaking up was the plane crashing into the side of Nimitz Hill.

So how does this relate to the markets? According to the same study, Americans are supposed to have one of the lowest PDI’s, meaning that in order to avoid catastrophe, we aren’t afraid to speak up to authority in order to ring the alarms. Gladwell refers to this as “The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes”.

Apparently, when it comes to speaking up about potential fraud

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Last year, the illusion of permanent wealth and prosperity was shattered. Just as The Great Depression followed the ‘roaring’ 20s, so we now face a huge correction to years of unrestricted gains. But take the historical parallels further, and Andrew Gordon says this year could be your best chance in decades to secure your financial future.

This from Investor’s Daily Edge:

We thought we were in a “New Era.” We thought the party would never end.

Saving was out. Why save when stock prices were going up so fast. For almost eight straight years the stock market knew only one trajectory and that was up. “Buy now and pay later” defined not just a financial strategy but a lifestyle. And not only for the rich and well-off. Everybody was convinced that they could get rich.

Of course Wall Street was getting all the credit. And a big part of Wall Street’s success was enticing

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If Madoff has made off with your money, you should have received claim forms from the trustee. If you haven't, you can get the form by a href="http://www.sipc.org/cases/docs/Madoff%20Customer%20Web%20Claim%20Form.pdf" target="_blank"clicking here/a.br /You should also reada href="http://www.sipc.org/cases/madoff_instructions.cfm" target="_blank" the instructions/a. Please note: the claim form should be sent to the trustee, not the SIPC nor the SEC.div class="blogger-post-footer"div class='adsense' style='text-align:center; padding: 0px 3px 0.5em 3px;' script type="text/javascript"!-- google_ad_client="ca-pub-2427831169011625"; google_ad_width=300; google_ad_height=250; google_ad_format="300x250_as"; google_ad_type="text"; google_ad_channel ="8681602088"; google_color_border="FFF3DB"; google_color_bg="FFF3DB"; google_color_link="1B0431"; google_color_url="1B0431"; google_color_text="29303B"; //--/script script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js" /script /div

As the bond markets improve, and equities makes attempts to rise, convertible securities hold an interesting and potentially attractive position within the capital structure of speculative companies.

Among the convertible securities funds, we like Vanguard Convertible fund the best (symbol VCVSX).  Unlike most other types of bonds, there are no ETF products for convertible bonds, although there are some preferred securities CEF products. We have no current opinion about the CEFs, except to say that generally we prefer mutual funds or ETFs over CEFs.

VCVSX versus convertible CEFs:

Those convertible CEFs with over $100 million of assets and 5 years or more of history are: JQC, NCV, AVK, CHY, and CHI. Here is how their recent performance compares to VCVSX (shown in solid black line).

Convertible Funds versus Other Bond Fund Types and the S&P 500:

We prefer VCVSX for convertible bond (and some preferred)

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In this portion of the economic cycle, we typically see all sorts of causes and reasons for fault. This time, its no different...br /br /We've seen "the fall of the U.S." theories...br /h1 style="font-style: italic;"span style="font-size:78%;"a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123051100709638419.html"As if Things Weren't Bad Enough, Russian Professor Predicts End of U.S./a/span/h1Its an interesting theory, but pretty light on the substance. This guy fails to take into consideration the actual climate in America.br /br /And of course "the death of free-market capitalism" calls...br /br /a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/12/laissezfaire_capitalism_should.html"span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;"Laissez-Faire Capitalism Should Be as Dead as Soviet Communism/span/abr /br /Again, awfully light on substance. Its so easily to rip on free-market capitalism during recessions, but people often forget about the wealth created by capitalism which probably is the reason the writer had a job to begin with. Some like to have it both ways. Its easy to tear down ...

ETF Securities, a leading provider of commodity-based exchange-traded products in Europe, is entering the U.S. market.

 

ETF Securities, a leading provider of commodity-based exchange-traded products in Europe, is entering the U.S. market.

The London-based company has more than $6.5 billion in assets under management and more than 100 different products trading in Europe. It has resolutely stayed away from the U.S. market, however, until now: On December 19, the company filed papers with the Securities and Exchange Commission for the right to launch a silver bullion exchange-traded fund in the U.S.

The fund itself appears to be unremarkable. It will hold silver bullion as its sole asset, in much the same way as the iShares Silver Trust (NYSEArca: SLV). SLV currently has $2.2 billion in assets, and is well-established in the space. It's unclear how ETF Securities will position the new ETF against SLV. ETF Securities declined to

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The table below presents the SEC 30-day yield and the portfolio yield-to-maturity reported for most of the Barclay’s iShares bond ETFs.

Note, that unlike an individual bond with a fixed interest yield and yield-to-maturity, bond funds have turnover which causes portfolio yields to change.

To provide some historical perspective, the following charts plot the 19 year history of US Treasuries with maturities from 1 month through 30 years.

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CME Group (CME) has lost more than half of its market value over the past three months and the stock price has cratered by nearly three-quarters in the past year. As illustrated in the accompanying three-month chart and table of valuation parameters [click to enlarge] for the major U.S.-listed exchanges, CME is extremely oversold and trades at less than two-thirds of book value (0.66) despite its position as the world's largest futures exchange with a major new source of revenue in the form of central counterparty clearing for credit default swaps [CDS] – which represents an estimated $45-$60 trillion market. I have initiated a long position in CME around 183 ...

GoldDrivers 2009 – Extraordinary Bullish Outlook for Gold

By: Eric Hommelberg ldSeek.com

Dollar topping out Physical demand skyrocketing Supply chain shutting down COMEX Gold Manipulation exposed Gold shares on the move again

It sure has been a brutal year for gold and its shares and many may wonder if the $1030 top clocked in March 2008 marked the top for the gold bull market that started in April 2001. Despite the fact that many analysts want you to believe that gold has failed to act as a

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