- The month of January came to an end, and it didn’t play out the way most people believed it would
- Remember when the year began, everybody was optimistic on the U.S. dollar
- Remember I said that it was the most crowded trade
- It was just like gold the year before
- Everybody was convinced that now that Trump was President we were going to have all this fiscal stimulus
- The Fed was going to be tightening rates more aggressively
- The dollar had no place else to go but up;
- Everybody started the year long the dollar
- I just read that this was the worst January for the dollar in almost 30 years!
- For all the fanfare and the hype about Dow 20,000
- The Dow was only up about .5% in the month of January
- You would think that it was much higher than that
- And of course, measured in any other currency, the Dow was down quite a bit
- In fact, if you just look at our mutual funds
- To just give you an example of what’s going on overseas
- First of all, our Gold Fund up 12% in the month of January
- But my International Value Fund was up 6.5% in the month of January
- That fund is the #1 fund on Morningstar so far in 2017
- It was also the #1 fund in its category of 400 or so for all of 2016
- And it’s already the #1 fund for 2017
- But if you look at the returns that are being achieved internationally
- Investing outside the dollar
- Investing in gold stocks
- That’s where all the money is being made
- It’s not being made in the U.S. Stock Market
- In other currencies, it’s actually, it’s only up in dollars
- But it’s down in terms of just about every other currency
- So you wouldn’t know that from listening to the pundits
- Everybody is so excited about what’s going on
- Again this is probably how it all started when George Bush came in
- People were still initially enthusiastic about what was going to happen
- But the honeymoon didn’t last long