Stay hungry, not foolish.

As Steve Jobs once recalled to Stanford’s graduating class, “stay hungry, stay foolish”.   Well, ever listened to the so - called “experts” in the world of finance being interviewed and thought “what a fool”?  No?  Maybe it’s just me then.  Maybe being foolish in this sense isn’t so good.  Perhaps we should let these people stay foolish, and for us to stay hungry.  Hungry for understanding: analyzing a problem and deriving some sort of conclusion.

Thanks to the popularization of the term “bubble”, these ever so clever “experts” are using this phrase left, right, and centre (and maybe up and down too).  But what does a bubble mean?  What’s the difference between a “bubble” and a “bull run”?  Or is there one?  This blog sets out to try and set the record straight, by taking time to stop and think (not very popular nowadays!) what the term “bubble” actually means.  Then it will look at the price of gold and try to assess whether the term “bubble” can be accurately applied to its price movements.

And just to keep the juices flowing, this is an interview with the "experts" in 2010 discussing a possible gold bubble (I’ve slummed it by watching CNBC, I know).  Note how the word “bubble” rolls so easily off the presenter’s tongue…   Who  is right?  By the end of this blog we’ll come back to these assessments and see if they really are foolish!