I used to ask myself why a pure silver bug like me insists on reading a currency rag.

Silver and Gold might be money, but they ain’t traded on the Forex.

I suppose this is part of why Chuck Butler’s Daily Pfennig has become a part of my daily routine.

Butler recently quoted David Galland on buying Gold… Here’s David…

“Buy gold. Unless and until there is an angry upwelling of popular discontent at the growing size of government – and it has to be far more substantive than just a few vocal talk radio jocks, or even 100,000 or so people peacefully gathering on the Mall in Washington DC – the government will continue to grow, or even just keep running at current levels, which means the destruction of the dollar. Many tangible assets will do well, but their intrinsic value as money means gold (and silver) will do best.”

That would have been enough for me, but as it turns out, I had already come to know David Galland, who also turns out to be a fan of one of my favorite books, THE FOURTH TURNING, AN AMERICAN PROPHECY, by Neil Howe and the late William Strauss.

More on this in a minute…

Last week I happened to be listening to a radio interview with Mr. Gold, Jim Sinclair of JSMineSet (previously reviewed by me).

Sinclair was talking about his father, who worked with the legendary trader, Jesse Livermore.

(It turns out a good day-trading friend of mine had recently discovered Livermore, which was the first I’d heard of them)

Anyway, Sinclair brought up a Livermore axiom that really stuck with me and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

Livermore said that the most important thing when trading is to:

“establish and commit to a position, then use the technicals to support or improve the cost basis..”

Hey, just like I do. I don’t really consider myself a trader. I buy silver coins on the dips and/or when I can. That’s the commitment.

The other part of that or “using the technicals to support or improve the cost basis” is a tricky thing to do in the silver market.

Especially, as long as prices are determined by futures or paper silver. That is to say, manipulated or suppressed.

I think the only way to know when it’s really time to sell is when silver shows up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

I often feel taken advantage of by the chartists anyway.

Pardon the surf analogy, but it’s somewhat how I think about the surf conditions –Even though the short-term or local conditions matter some, its the long-term ground swell that we wait for.  You know the winter is coming, just now when the good days will actually arrive.

If you have a lot of extra cash, you might be able to use the technicals to leverage money around the mining sector, to support your cost basis. But for guys like me, that is mostly dreaming. I’m just happy my local coin guy is still able to find coins.

Okay. So anyone who invests in silver can attest to volatility.

Therefore, we need a direction, a path, a clear sense of where things are headed, a signal that the seasons are about to change.

Among other things it’s important to look at what the macro is telling you and stick to that direction and try to keep the short-term volatility in perspective.

I think a lot of people sort of wake up to find it warm and sunny and only then realize that it must be summer.

I enjoy learning from David Galland,  guys like him take “the chance” and really look at the long-term picture. Or, unlike many writers, he simply looks at what the policymakers are doing, and acknowledging their power to carry out these policies, and their track records.

Galland puts together a really good, once a week kind of read, an organized look at how the short term relates to the longer view contrarion  point of view.

You can find him over at Casey Research in the free section.

Galland is also an inflationist, which again, for the long-term is always in the cards for a fiat currency and what all central powers do, if they can get away with it – which they probably will for a while.

As I alluded to above, I became a raving fan of Galland is from reading the interview that he did with Neil Howe, author of “The Fourth Turning”.

You can check it out here:

http://www.safehaven.com/article-14670.htm

Galland may help you in keeping that needed focus on the broader horizon.

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