qfx

Apparently, this sale happened in the fourth quarter. The fourth quarter! Like it’s some profound revelation. They’re telling us this now? It’s like finding out your neighbor had a barbecue three months ago. What am I supposed to do with that information? And then they tack on this nonsense about the position’s value rising by $11.54 million. Rising! While they were selling. It’s just… contradictory. It’s like they’re trying to confuse you. And you know what? It’s working.

When things get rumblingly unpleasant in places like the Mideast – and let’s face it, they often do – people get the jitters. They start thinking, “Good heavens, what if everything goes horribly wrong?” And when they think that, they rush about buying gold. It’s a perfectly ridiculous habit, of course, but a profitable one for the gold miners. This time, they did just that. But the trouble is, gold gets bored. It doesn’t like being fussed over. So, after a brief excitement, it decides to sulk and the price slithers downwards. And when gold slithers, Newmont wobbles.

Yet, it is precisely in these moments of quietude that opportunity reveals itself. The recent decline in valuation, viewed by some as a cause for alarm, strikes me as a rather…excessive reaction. A harsh judgment upon a company that, despite its present circumspection, possesses a core strength that few can rival. It is a stock, in my estimation, unduly punished, and thus, a most attractive proposition for a patient investor.

The market, as these things will, has responded with a degree of skittishness. Oil, naturally, is taking the brunt of it, currently flirting with the ninety-nine dollar mark – a positively dizzying sum, and a good seventy-two percent higher than where it was earlier in the year. One shudders to think what the cost of petrol will be if this carries on!

He’s worried about the situation in, shall we say, the hotter regions of the world, and rightly so. Wars are rarely kind to ledgers. A brief flurry of activity, a bit of disruption to the oil flow, and suddenly everyone’s paying more for… well, everything. Dimon’s assessment, delivered with the sort of grim practicality that suggests he’s already priced it into his models, is that a short-lived conflict won’t be catastrophic. But he’s also warning us not to be complacent. Complacency, in my experience, is merely a polite word for ‘about to be very, very wrong.’