Shawn Burns is Solve the Riddle

  FISCAL 2026 – THE YEAR OF ROTATION, APOCALYSE AND WAR. There is little doubt in my mind that 2026 has had significant challenges, especially for my style of investing. Every style has its time in the sun and in the shade, but this year seems a bit different to the usual outcome of being out of favour every three or four years. My style, quality growth had its last difficult year, in 2022, the post-C19 hangover, when interest rates were jacked up after the Central banks kept interest rates too low for way too long, in their infinite wisdom. Fair enough, if every style continued to outperform every year, it would get overbought and overheld and preclude favourable investing. So, every style needs a clean out of the momentum guys and camp followers, etc., again, fair enough. With all that in mind, 2026 has had a bit more to it than usual, and that’s what I want to comment on here. So, 2026 is a year for the mean-reverting value guys to do well, and they have been waiting a while, ...

  GOLD STRATEGY APRIL 2026, Gold, FNV and WPM Summaries are from NotebookLM, sourcing transcripts, company presentations and filings; my commentary is added . Gold price The charts below, the top two courtesy of Auscap, show a story of the relative strength of the gold price. In real terms in is almost twice as high as the dramatic 1980 peak. Of course, my framework on gold is that the price is mainly determined by growth in the money supply of the major economic blocs (G3). I use M2, but I could use other definitions. M2 seems a reasonable money supply measure to follow. The theory is that over the long-term gold will follow the aggregate growth in the money supply. The time lags and correlation are not that tight, which is common in the real world. The graph below (from Gemini) shows a correlation of 0.58, which is not bad for real-world correlations, but it does imply that we should expect sustained deviations from the trend, in both time and magnitude. The red dashed lin...