Crimson,

I would take your friends responses, and be so happy, as it is confirmation that we are still in Phase 2 (being Pessimism) of this gold bull. If all your friends understood, and said, "Yeah, you're right, I'm tired of losing money every year to this rampant inflation, let's all go buy gold," well, we would be closer to Phase 3 or Phase 4 (being Optimism and Euphoria) depending on how forward-thinking your friends are.

The only difference between this coming Phase 4 and the Phase 4 of NASDAQ bubble will be that the later was driven by greed, and the former will be more powerful, as it will be driven by fear.

We are still in a window of time where we are being given the gift of accumulation opportunity. I believe that when we have a permanant floor above $1,000/oz, we will begin the transition to Phase 3. I still am not sure if gold is ready to break through this time; there may be one more down leg left to go for another few months, just to shake off the final disbelievers.

I haven't posted for a while, but have been very quietly accumulating, here from the other side of the world.

Hysteria

"All my friends, the ones who were busy laughing at me in 2005 for not buying real estate (and aren't laughing anymore, since they did) still think I'm crazy, but now for different reasons. Why would you want to buy oil at these prices? It's going down, and everyone is broke. Why would you want to buy gold stocks when gold can't seem to respond well in crisis? People don't have money to buy gold. Prices are going down, not up. BLAH BLAH BLAH."