Welcome to GoldBuzz INSIDER

INSIDER is a comprehensive, rules-based system for precious metals, built on decades of historical data, designed to outperform simple buy-and-hold investing for both passive and active investors. It is built to increase your returns when conditions are favorable, and reduce your risk during the inevitable downturns.

Whether you’re a passive or active investor, you can significantly improve your results by using different parts of the system.

If you're primarily a passive investor - perhaps holding mining ETFs like GDX or SIL, or even gold and silver bullion - the signals are the main event and they are powerful. Instead of just buying and holding GDX (the largest gold mining ETF), by using the INSIDER Gold Miners Min Risk signal to tell you when to be in or out of GDX, you would have significantly increased your profit over the past 15 years. More importantly, you would have reduced your worst drawdown from a gut-churning 81% to 36%, with only 1-2 trades per year. The same approach with the Silver Miners Min Risk signal to trade SIL, cut the worst drawdown from 65% to 30%.

If that’s how you prefer to invest, you don't need to engage with the miner rankings or the portfolio at all to capture this benefit. Most days, your only action is checking the dashboard to confirm the signal hasn't changed.

If you want to take it further - picking individual mining stocks rather than ETFs - the daily rankings of 230+ miners give you a systematic basis for selection. You can use the rankings to inform your own picks while still following the signals for timing.

If you want the most hands-on approach - a fully systematic stock portfolio - the INSIDER Portfolio rebalances weekly based on the rankings, holding up to 20 equal-weighted positions when the Gold Miners Min Risk signal is bullish and moving entirely to cash when it turns bearish.

All three approaches use the same underlying systems. You can start with the lightest engagement and expand as you become familiar with the signals, or stay at whatever level fits your time and temperament.

What you have access to

INSIDER covers five markets - Gold, Silver, Gold Miners, Silver Miners, and Bitcoin - each with two systems running in parallel. Min Risk prioritises capital preservation and avoiding drawdowns. Max Return aims to capture the largest possible gains over time. That's ten separate signals telling you when each market is a good place to be invested and when it's safer to stand aside.

The Miner Rankings layer on top of the signals. Every day, over 230 individual gold and silver mining companies are scored and ranked, so when the signals say it's time to be in miners, you have a clear view of which names are standing out.

The INSIDER Portfolio takes this further for gold miners specifically. It's a systematic, rules-based selection of up to 20 gold miners that follows the Gold Miners signals and rebalances weekly. Historically, following this Portfolio has produced substantial outperformance versus a gold mining ETF buy-and-hold position.

How to use this guide

The individual system pages go deep on each of the five markets. Before you drill in, the rest of this page defines the vocabulary you'll see across all of them - what Min Risk and Max Return really mean, which metrics matter most, and how to read a system's trading profile. Take five minutes on this before you head into the individual guides; it'll save you time later.

Min Risk vs Max Return

Every market has two systems.

The Min Risk system is highly selective, often sitting in cash for extended periods, and only invests when conditions are strongly favourable. It typically produces lower total returns than Max Return, but with significantly smaller losses during downturns. Your capital spends more time safely on the sidelines.

The Max Return system is the opposite. It’s designed to capture as many profitable opportunities as possible. It's more active, spends more time invested, and aims to maximise your total return over time. The trade-off is more frequent investments and the occasional false start.

Neither approach is “better” - it depends on your temperament and goals, but both aim to outperform a buy-and-hold approach, while sparing you from the worst drawdowns.

Many subscribers start with Min Risk or choose to follow both systems for a given market and allocate between them based on their own risk tolerance.

You’ll find detailed data on drawdowns and other risk metrics on the individual system pages.

Annualised Return (CAGR)

CAGR stands for Compound Annual Growth Rate. It's the average yearly return your investment would have earned over the entire period, accounting for compounding. If a system shows a CAGR of 12%, it means that $1,000 invested at the start would have grown as if it earned 12% every year, with each year's gains reinvested.

We show this alongside buy-and-hold's CAGR so you can see whether the system outperformed simply owning the asset and doing nothing (buy and hold).

Exposure-Adjusted CAGR

This is one of the most important numbers in this guide. Standard CAGR treats the entire period equally, whether the system was invested or sitting in cash. But if a system is only in the market 30% of the time, the days it is invested are working much harder than the headline number suggests.

Exposure-Adjusted CAGR measures the return per unit of time actually invested. Think of it this way: if two systems both return 10% per year, but one is invested all year and the other achieves the same return while only being in the market for four months, the second system is using your capital three times more efficiently. The remaining eight months, your money is in cash and available for other uses - or simply not at risk.

For buy-and-hold, the exposure-adjusted CAGR is the same as the standard CAGR, since you're invested 100% of the time.

Worst Drawdown

A drawdown is the largest peak-to-trough decline - the biggest drop from a high point to a subsequent low point. If an investment rises to $10,000 and then falls to $6,000 before recovering, that's a 40% drawdown.

This is arguably the most important risk measure because it tells you the worst pain you would have experienced. A system with a 25% worst drawdown feels fundamentally different to live through than one with a 75% worst drawdown, even if their long-term returns are similar. We compare each system's worst drawdown against buy-and-hold's worst drawdown so you can see how much pain the system avoided.

Investing Profile

Each system page includes four numbers that describe how the system behaves day-to-day:

Time in Market is the percentage of days the system is invested rather than sitting in cash. A system with 30% time in market is in cash more often than not. A system with 80% is almost always invested.

Trades per Year tells you how often the system changes its signal. A system with 10 trades per year is giving you a new signal almost every month. A system with 1 trade per year might hold the same position for the entire year.

Average Trade Duration is how long a typical position lasts before the system exits.

Longest Idle Period is the maximum number of consecutive days the system spent in cash. This is important for setting expectations - if a system's longest idle period is two years, you need to be comfortable sitting on the sidelines for that long.

A Note on Testing

The systems have been designed using large amounts of historical data, going back as far as reliable data is available. In every case, hundreds of thousands of methodologies were built and tested on unseen data to establish their validity.

Heatmaps were then used to find the most statistically significant areas that are predictive of future price movement on unseen data.

All performance figures in this guide are based on historical testing - applying each system's live rules to actual market data.

The testing periods differ by market: gold and silver data extends back to 2001, gold and silver miners to 2010 and 2014 respectively, and Bitcoin to 2018.

These systems are built to capture fundamental market dynamics - momentum, trend, and cycle patterns - that have persisted across decades and across very different market environments. The long testing periods give us confidence that the systems are robust, and the live system has been in use for over a year with beta testers while I've been using it myself to guide my own investments.

Next Steps

Now it’s time to check out each of your individual models, so you know what to expect from each one and choose which ones work best for your requirements.