The Flying Frisby - money, markets and more

Before we begin today’s piece, if you should happen to be in the Scottish neck of the woods this August, I am doing one of my lectures with funny bits at the Edinburgh Fringe this year. This one is about gold . It has got Greek gods, interstellar collisions, heists and Nazis. What more you could want in a show? It’s from August 4th to 20th at 2pm. Please come if you are in town- you can get ticket...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com Please do not share, copy, reproduce or distribute any part of this report without the express permission of the author. I am going to do something I don’t often do today, and that is tell you about a silver mining company. The reason? I think it could rally by 50%, and quickly. I make no secret of my ambivalence...

A number of people I know have started using Ozempic. This is the drug, otherwise known as Wegovy, beloved by the likes of Elon Musk and Jeremy Clarkson, that suppresses your appetite, so enabling you to lose weight. Not only does it suppress your appetite, it actually turns you off food. I’ve been overweight in the past. I get how hard it is to shed pounds. It takes a lot of time, effort and pers...

Sometimes I look at what is happening in the world around me, both at home and abroad, and I feel like I’m watching some kind of slow-motion car crash. It’s so obvious what is happening , what is going to happen, and yet the protagonists are oblivious. At school we learnt about dramatic irony: when the audience sees what the characters in the play don’t. That’s how I feel when I watch what Western...

Tom Haynes wrote an interesting piece in the Telegraph the other day to mark the 40th birthday of the pound coin.  “The pound in your pocket is now worth just 30p” ran the title, followed by the subhead “Some 40 years after the first pound coins were minted, their relevance is waning”. I’ll say! But the pound has actually lost a lot more than 70% of its value, and the article’s own statistics demo...

Following on from my piece last week Tyranny of the Midwits , I was having dinner the other day with a friend who is a big cheese behind the scenes in government. I won’t say his name. Discretion is everything. In any case, his name doesn’t really matter to what I’m about to say. I was busy moaning, as we all do, about the state of the country, and at the fact that there are so many things that, i...

A one-hour interview with private investor Danny Solomon, discussing which markets we like and which we don’t … and a bit about Chelsea too. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

In 2004 James Turk and John Rubino published The Coming Collapse Of The Dollar And How To Profit From It: Make A Fortune By Investing In Gold And Other Hard Assets . I discover from Amazon that I “purchased this item on 18 Feb 2006”. Isn’t digital record keeping amazing? It remains one of the best books about gold and gold investing that I have ever read, beautifully articulating the anti-dollar,...

Comedian Simon Evans joins me for a video interview in which we discuss the re-writing of Wodehouse and the nature of slippery slopes. If you prefer the video version, it is here . I share a flat with Simon at the Edinburgh Festival most years and I will say that Simon is one of the most well-read and well-informed people I have ever met. He seems to spend every spare moment he has listening to au...

The other night I did that thing on Substack: you follow one writer you like’s recommendations onto another’s and onto another’s and, before you know it, you’re down a rabbit hole. While down there I came across the term “midwits”. It really made me laugh. I know I’m late to it, but my finger is not on the cool kids’ internet jargon pulse. But I love it. Instead of the dimwit for the stupid, we ha...

Before getting started today, I just wanted to flag that Kisses on a Postcard won silver at the New York Festivals Radio Awards for best serialised podcast. We beat off competition from major production houses, including Lionsgate, the BBC and MediaHuis (Ireland’s largest media group), which is good. If you haven’t already listened, load it onto your favourite podcast app and play it while you are...

The gold price printed its highest ever weekly close on Friday.  What do new highs usually lead to? Yup. More new highs.  Is it too late to buy gold ? Nope.  Should you own some? Yup. Everyone should own some gold .  Put 5% of your net worth into gold and hope it doesn’t go up. That’s the old Wall Street adage that I am forever quoting, and I quote it again today. Here are my thoughts on gold and...

Today is April 6, the beginning of the new tax year In the UK. Odd that the UK tax year should begin on such an apparently random date as April 6, but there is a reason. Once upon a time, the new year in England did not begin in the middle of winter on January 1. The year was aligned with the seasons and it began around the spring equinox (when the length of day and night is the same) on 25 March...

I didn’t get involved in the Lineker wars, mainly because I had other stuff on, but the affair triggered a little moment of realisation in me. That is: how conflation is used as a political weapon. It probably always was, but today, in all this political and philosophical division, conflation seems to be everywhere. The Great Conflation conflation noun the act or process of merging two or more sep...

It’s my pleasure this week to once again interview Paul Kingsnorth, author of many books and the excellent Substack, the Abbey of Misrule. This is thought-provoking interview in which we discuss how we would like society to be designed: the best systems of rule, our philosophical journeys to small and local government, radical localisation, the failures of modern politics and globalisation, the de...

I went to a mining conference on Monday - the Mining Journal Select London. As well as being on a panel, I wanted to catch up with the management of a couple of companies I hold shares in and get a feel for the state of the industry. Mining is cyclical. If there’s a shortage of some metal or natural resource, the price of that resource will go up. Rising prices encourage people to start looking fo...

In your time bestriding the narrow world like a Colossus, you might have heard the term, “bearer asset” or “bearer instrument”. That would be an asset that you take physical possession of - cash or bullion , for example - an asset that is effectively owned by whoever has possession of it, that can be transferred from one person to another by just handing it over. The ownership of the asset is not...

With the latest developments in AI, ChatGPT, Midjourney et al, we are experiencing something that, in terms of impact, will prove as big as the internet was in the late 1990s, if not bigger. Following on from my chat with Andy last week, which has had really good feedback from those watched / listened (some haven’t had time yet), we have another really interesting conversation for you today about...

Once upon a time, the business model of war was straightforward. You attacked some neighbouring realm, overpowered it, then plundered and taxed the conquered people. The Vikings were great pioneers of the model, as was Ancient Rome: it worked for as long as the empire kept expanding and Rome kept winning wars. When the expansion stopped, Rome had to replace the plunder with some other form of inco...

Jonathan Johnson, from recruitment company, Auxato, got in touch and asked me to write a piece for him, explaining how it is I got from being stand-up comic and voice actor to a renowned (his words) longstanding, financial writer for Money Week. I thought readers would like it and he kindly gave me permission to republish it here. The questions are Jonathan’s. Stand-up comedy – what life skills di...

A 90 minute interview about AI, the latest developments and the implications for our future with Andy . Andy is an experienced technical architect and lifelong technologist, coder and hacker. He designs systems that span security, finance, automation, IoT and proptech - and devotes a lot of his time to thinking about how technology will continue to transform our world. This is a public episode. If...

I’ve seen it happen with so many niche commodities - potash, graphite, antimony, rare earth metals, cobalt, vanadium - and I am pretty sure it is happening again. There is some substance you’ve barely heard of. Suddenly, it’s essential to some new technology which is going to save the earth in some way, but nobody’s producing it.  Why is nobody producing it, if it’s so essential? Because prices ar...

Today I wanted to expand on a theme I have been writing about for a while : that the green energy revolution is anything but green.  In fact, the amount of metal required and the amount of fossil fuel needed to be burnt to make it happen means it will be extraordinarily damaging to the environment, while unprecedented amounts of CO2 will be released into the atmosphere. Moreover, unlike the inflat...

The bitcoin price has been quietly moving up and, almost inevitably, I am getting messages from people asking how to buy it. Bitcoin should make up a core part of your investment portfolio. Never mind the noise, the doubts, the FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt), the “but I don’t understand how it works”, bitcoin is an incredible computational breakthrough with enormous implications for the world....

A few weeks ago, an Irish friend of mine was contacted by the Irish Postal service. A package had arrived for her from abroad, but there were a couple of euros and change of duties to be paid. This had happened to her before - she buys a lot of stuff on the internet, clothes especially - and she duly got out her debit card and paid up. A week or so later, she was sitting in a meeting, when she sta...