Tag: casey research

Are You a High-Stakes Speculator?

Posted on by The INO.com Team

I attended this year's New Orleans Investment Conference along with Doug Casey, Marin Katusa, and Casey Research's CEO, Olivier Garret. It was fun to see many old friends among the attendees and other speakers, but the most interesting thing was an experiment I conducted as part of my speech.

You see, there had been a talk earlier in the conference on picking "ten-baggers" (stocks that go up 1,000%). Now, there's nothing wrong with shooting for ten times your investment in a highly volatile stock. It's neither a crazy nor a hyped-up claim – we've had many ten-baggers in our portfolios, including Silver Wheaton (SLW) and First Majestic (AG). But it's not easy, and many of the nano-cap stocks that offer that sort of potential do the opposite and drop 90% – if not all the way to zero.

So I asked the audience to raise their hands if they wanted ten-baggers in their portfolios. About three-fourths of the audience put their hands up. I didn't take time to count the hands, but it was a lot of people – several hundred.

I then explained the realities involved: Continue reading "Are You a High-Stakes Speculator?" →

Another Layer of Bureaucracy for Oil and Gas Exploration in the US?

Posted on by The INO.com Team

On May 11, 2012, the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) published proposed regulations governing "Oil and Gas; Well Stimulation, Including Hydraulic Fracturing, on Federal and Indian Lands." BLM is a latecomer to this party. Its belated meddling lacks practical or economic justification. Instead, the proposed BLM rule would drive oil and gas developers off federal and tribal lands. Complying with the rules is too complicated and costly. Producers can realize a much faster and much better return on their capital investment by developing oil and gas reserves on adjoining private lands.

Federal and tribal lands hold large reserves of oil and natural gas. At a time when the United States desperately needs to move toward, not away from, energy independence, it makes no sense to let bureaucratic meddling effectively place these valuable domestic reserves out of reach. The problems with BLM's approach are myriad. Continue reading "Another Layer of Bureaucracy for Oil and Gas Exploration in the US?" →

What's Going on in CRM?

Posted on by The INO.com Team

By Doug Hornig, Casey Research

In Mike Judge's wicked 1999 satire of corporate culture, Office Space, there's a delightful character named Milton. Poor Milton. He's all but invisible. No one likes him, no one talks to him, and coworkers are forever stealing his stapler. Management doesn't notice him enough to fire him. Instead, Milton is shunted from desk to desk, each time losing more of that precious commodity denoted by the film's title, until he finally winds up alone in the basement, where he plots the delicious revenge he'll take on the company.

In times past, customer relations staffs were where the Miltons of the world most likely landed. If you couldn't do anything else, you could probably listen to phone complaints all day. No one wanted to, but somebody had to do it. And so they did, until they went mad from boredom or frustration.

That was then. Today, there's a new shine on customer relations departments, and the field has earned itself a fresh, glossy title and a widely recognized abbreviation: customer relations management, or CRM. And it's become an integral part of the SaaS (software as a service) industry. Continue reading "What's Going on in CRM?" →

Putin Is the New Global Shah of Oil

Posted on by The INO.com Team

By Marin Katusa, Casey Research

Exxon Mobil is no longer the world's number-one oil producer. As of yesterday, that title belongs to Putin Oil Corp – oh, whoops. I mean the title belongs to Rosneft, Russia's state-controlled oil company.

Rosneft is buying TNK-BP, which is a vertically integrated oil company co-owned by British oil firm BP and a group of Russian billionaires known as AAR. One of the top-ten privately owned oil producers in the world, in 2010 TNK-BP churned out 1.74 million barrels of oil equivalent per day from its assets in Russia and Ukraine and processed almost half that amount through its refineries.

With TNK-BP in its hands, Rosneft will be in charge of more than 4 million barrels of oil production a day. And who is in charge of Rosneft? None other than Vladimir Putin, Russia's resource-full president. Continue reading "Putin Is the New Global Shah of Oil" →

One Chart Explains Why Government Debt Is Dragging on the Economy

Posted on by The INO.com Team

By Dan Steinhart, Casey Research

The US has too much debt. This is no longer a controversial statement. Some may believe other problems are more urgent, or that we need to grow our way out rather than slash spending. But even the most spendthrift pundits acknowledge that the debt-to-GDP ratio of the US must decrease if we are to have a stable, prosperous economy.

The private sector has reacted to this over-indebted reality as you would expect: by deleveraging. Since 2008, households and businesses have extinguished of 67% of their debt when measured against GDP. Some paid debt down purposefully, and others defaulted. For our purposes, it doesn't matter how the debt went away. Only that it did.

Meanwhile, the government has done the exact opposite. It has upped its own borrowing by 52% of GDP since 2008. Continue reading "One Chart Explains Why Government Debt Is Dragging on the Economy" →