Lima Days 1-2

Living in Lima is like practicing for the Primal Blueprint diet where Mark Sisson describes the best exercise as low intensity exercise like walking while mixing in a few sprints.  In Lima cars don't stop for you as you cross the street.  So you end up walking a lot and sprinting from curb to curb.   It's no joke here (I think the worst place I've seen is still Cario where people successfully cross freeways on a daily basis).

My parents live in the San Isidro district know for it's fine Italian dining.  I haven't had any of the Italian food here yet, but I did check out some menus the other day.  The cuisine here is taking on Italian in a new way - fusion this and fusion that.  The most interesting one I've seen was Japanese Italian fusion.  Didn't look appetizing, but I think I may have to try it.  

I challenged myself once already by eating beef heart.  See video.  I've never had beef heart.  I always thought I could do Fear Factor, but I'm not cut out for it.  I had a difficult time with the heart.  It was cooked well, seasoned well and tasted just fine, but the idea got to me.

Pisco sour is their national drink.  I'm not a big fan of it.  Tastes like margarita mix, probably cuz it's a lime/simple sugar concoction mostly.  I've gravitated to Cusqueno beer.  Lite taste and pretty cheap.  Seems to be the beer of choice.

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2x Silver and 150$/oz

AGQ
Today, while listening to Peter Schiff a 30yo caller asked about "diversifying" in silver.  This 30yo's version of diversifying was own 50% physical silver in the form of American Eagles and 50% paper silver.  The paper silver is the ETF AGQ.  Here's how AGQ compares to the paper silver ETF SLV.

After checking out AGQ, I'm interested.  Not sure I'm going to buy, but I probably will.  Not sure if AGQ is backed by physical silver or not, but the caller's rationale was that he can ride up the paper silver gains and if there is no counter-party fraud (ie if the silver ETFs are indeed backed by physical silver) then the paper silver WON'T go to zero.  If there is counter-party fraud then the physical silver will shoot up as the paper silver crumbles (I have no idea if that will be a net gain or net loss).


$150/oz
It's surprising to me that Jim Cramer buys physical silver too (video).  I thought buying physical silver is just for whackos.  There he mentions an article in the Financial Times (aka "FT") which I thought was interesting.  In the article (available once for free and the after that you need a subscription to read) a banker predicts a price of 150$/oz for silver, which reminded me of the Stansburry fear-mongering video that's been making the rounds.

Imagine what happens if silver goes to 150$/oz and AGQ is legit. What happens to AGQ?  Wow.

Here's a graphic from the Financial Times article:

Out with GOOG and in with NGD!!!

After listening to Pierre Lassonde on King World News, I decided to sell my 2 shares of Google and buy an equivalent amount of $s of New Gold shares at $10.11/sh.

I don't have a bear case for Google; it's still my "search" of choice, but I just don't have a really bull case for it.  And I had already held my shares of GOOG for more than 366 days, so my gains qualified as long term capital gains.

Lassonde makes a pretty good bull case for New Gold.  Gold itself is returning to it's proper place in society as a money - or so the people selling gold for paper are telling us.  Central Banks are printing, so gold is "rising" (it's really in part just holding it's value against other commodities, BUT it's rise, according to others, is also due to it's 're-monetization'.).

Lassonde makes a good case for Franco Nevada Corp, which I think is this stock.  I'm looking to buy.