Frank P

The Rise of the Silver Surfer

I think the reason Silver has fallen out of ratio is it tends to swing much wider than gold. So, yes, you can do well with silver but you can do worse too. The SLW model is likely to do even better in a good environment but in a bad one they'll be paying more than what they can sell for, which could finish them off. The miners have the same risk which is why they sell to SLW, but at least they own mines and so-forth than have value and could be sold.

Ignore Stock Market Volatility

William Goldman is a screenwriter and in Hollywood they don't have a clue what's going on typically. Maybe he meant nobodies like him no anything. There are always people on the inside or somewhere that know something. It's just hard to get to them or find them. Right now the market is so confusing that no one really knows but normally that's not the case.

Why Downey Financial is Not IndyMac

I think the problem with this reasoning is it assumes DSL can burn through customer deposits! I'm sure these people would be happy to find out their account is "worth north of 60-70% of par". Of course, the FDIC will shut them down before they get to that point.

XLF Volume Spikes 3.3 Standard Deviations Above Mean Yesterday

This type of logic is similar to how they came up with these mortgage pools. There's a lot of reasons why the volume might increase or change that make the statistics suspect. This XLF wasn't around during the last banking crisis so your data is made up of a slow period. This type of statistics can be helpful but you have to look at the reasons why banks were weak, which is because of real estate problems and over leverage. The crisis is over when these issues begin to resolve and that isn't happening. Wells Fargo changed their rules to put off problems which means they are going to get worse.