Happy Tuesday, GoldBuzzers!

The newsletter turns one this week, and to mark the occasion, today's edition hands the microphone to one of you.

A reader with an impeccable scientific pedigree and a healthy dose of skepticism decided to put GoldBuzz INSIDER through a proper trial, real money and all, then sent me the results this weekend. Tables included. I'll let his numbers do the talking.

Ok. Let’s get into it. ⬇️

Gold gave back some of Monday's early gains but held around $4,660 an ounce, its highest level since mid-May, while silver eased to around $69, still sitting near its best price since mid-June. Both metals are running on the same fuel. The Treasury's decision on August 19 to double its buybacks of long-dated bonds knocked the dollar to multi-month lows and handed gold a five percent weekly gain, with silver doing slightly better. Now come the tests.

July PCE inflation lands Wednesday morning, and new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh delivers his first Jackson Hole speech on Friday. Markets are pricing roughly one-in-three odds of a September rate hike, so either event could move that number and drag the metals with it.

On the geopolitical side, the Treasury Department unveiled an expanded secondary sanctions program on Monday aimed at Iran's trading partners. Secretary Scott Bessent said a major financial institution will be sanctioned by the end of the week and made clear China won't get a pass. That keeps oil prices and inflation risk in play, which complicates the rate picture in gold's favor.

Most reader mail I get runs a paragraph or two. On the weekend, INSIDER subscriber Mark A. sent me a full research report, complete with a profit and loss table, purchase dates, sale dates, and currency conversions. He's a retired microbiologist living in a tiny village in Hessen, Germany, and he spent his career running controlled experiments. So when he joined INSIDER in April, he did what scientists do. He designed a test.

His results deserve a wider audience, and Mark has kindly agreed to share them.

A life that earns your attention

Mark was born in Poland during the Second World War to Jewish parents who survived the Holocaust by passing as Christians. The family spent three years as displaced persons in Berlin before emigrating to Canada, where Mark earned his degrees in microbiology. A doctorate in the US followed, then research posts in Scotland, Germany, Ireland and England. He kept working until 2022, well past mandatory retirement age, before settling with his partner into a renovated timber-framed house in the German countryside.

His gold story starts in 1990, when he collected 19th century pocket watches. Gold was so cheap back then that watches in heavy 18K gold cases barely cost more than plain ones.

The watches eventually went, but the interest in gold stayed. He noticed that mining stocks were, in his words, “abysmally cheap”, and he's traded them ever since.

The 90 percent problem

Mark rode the surges of the mid-90s and early 2000s, and admits that at the peaks he felt "both rich and very smart." The run since 2016 paid for his house. But he had a weakness he could never fix on his own: he couldn't bring himself to sell losers.

He still holds a bucket of old positions that were originally worth 300,000 euros. Today they're worth about 31,000. That's a 90 percent loss, sitting in his account through the biggest precious metals bull market in a generation. He's lived through the multi-year drawdowns between surges, and they cost him more than money. They cost him sleep.

The experiment

Mark admits the first weeks since April came with a steep learning curve. INSIDER hands you a lot at once: the weekly portfolio, Bullish and Bearish signals across five markets, and the Miner Rankings, daily-updated tables scoring 230+ gold and silver mining companies. Mark says he's discovered companies through those tables he'd never heard of in 30 years of trading, and he was "very impressed" watching the system flag names like Falco Resources, Aya Gold & Silver and Wesdome before they ran.

But he wasn't ready to take any of it on faith. So he committed a quarter of his funds and replicated the INSIDER portfolio mechanically: buying every stock it added on Mondays, selling every stock it dropped. His own trades went in a separate bucket so nothing got mixed up. Everything was tracked in euros with full purchase and sale records.

His timing could hardly have been worse. GDX, the big gold miners ETF, fell as much as 25 percent between early April and its July low. Mark bought into the teeth of it, even though the Min Risk signals were bearish at the time. He wanted to test the system under pressure, and he got his wish.

What the numbers said

Across the test period, the portfolio bought and later sold 57 positions. Mark deployed 189,500 euros into them. His combined loss on all of those exits: 3.6 percent. During a stretch when the sector benchmark fell as much as 25 percent, weekly rebalancing kept his drawdown to a rounding error. That discipline, he wrote in an earlier note to me, has "revolutionised" his approach to mining stocks.

Then the market turned. His current portfolio holdings, bought as the system rotated into strength, are up 25 percent since purchase. His verdict: the subscription has "paid off in spades."

One more result from his report is worth highlighting, because it's the whole lesson in miniature. Mark also picked a few stocks himself from the Miner Rankings. That bucket gained only three percent, and his explanation is refreshingly blunt: "because I did not sell a loser." The stocks were fine. The discipline was missing.

He was also impressed by a call he couldn't explain. In late July the INSIDER Min Risk silver signal flipped bullish for no reason Mark could see. About a week later, silver began a run from under $58 an ounce to $70 by August 21.

Mark's figures are one subscriber's real-money replication, tracked in euros with his own execution timing and they make fascinating reading.

How the portfolio actually picks its stocks

Mark describes the portfolio's focus on "winners or potential winners" as its biggest advantage, so it's worth explaining how that focus works.

The portfolio draws from the full universe of over 230 gold and silver mining companies we track. Each week, the selection narrows in stages: we start with gold miners that have enough data to qualify, filter to those with a rising Trend against GDX, and then rank the survivors by their composite Score from the Miner Rankings. The top-ranked miners from that shortlist become the portfolio's holdings.

The portfolio is capped at 20 holdings and equally weighted across whatever number currently qualify. In most weeks that means 20 stocks at five percent each, but when fewer miners meet the criteria the portfolio will hold fewer, sometimes as few as 10-15, with the weight per stock scaling up so it remains fully invested when the signal is Bullish. The portfolio doesn't fill empty slots with weaker picks just to reach 20.

This is the part that made the difference for Mark. Buying and holding GDX through that stretch would have meant riding a loss of as much as 25 percent, with no plan beyond hoping. The portfolio's rules forced an exit from every stock that lost its ranking, week after week, and those clearly defined exits shrank the same market decline to a 3.6 percent loss on everything he sold.

The Tuesday takeaway

Mark describes himself as a "satisfied subscriber", and his exit plan is already decided: the day Max Return turns bearish, he sells everything. When I drafted this piece, I told him the lesson was the value of having a plan. He corrected me, and he's earned the right to. He's had plans before. Buy and hold was a plan. He followed it faithfully for decades, and it's what turned 300,000 euros into 31,000.

The difference this time is what the plan is built on. Look at the signals' record over his four months as a member. Min Risk was bearish through the whole decline, keeping cautious money out while miners fell as much as 25 percent, and its silver flip in late July landed a week before a 20 percent surge. Max Return, which accepts drawdowns in exchange for catching the big moves, stayed bullish through the summer low. That stance is the reason Mark was still holding when the rally arrived, at exactly the moment his old instincts would have had him anguishing over whether to sell, and it's why his current holdings are up 25 percent rather than sitting in cash after a sale at the bottom.

That's the correction Mark insisted I make to this piece: the credit goes to the signals, not to willpower. His discipline never wavered in 30 years. It just spent those years pointed at buy and hold, a rule nobody had ever tested for him.

So here's your action item this week, straight from Mark's playbook. Take whatever rule currently governs your portfolio, even if that rule is "hold and hope," and ask one question: what evidence do I have that it works? If the honest answer is none, do what he did. Test a better one with a slice of your money, track every trade, and let the results decide.

Mark spent decades feeling rich at the peaks and stuck in the valleys. What changed this year wasn't his discipline. He always had that. It was finally pointing it at something tested, and that part is available to anyone. It doesn't even require a doctorate.

That’s all for this Tuesday, folks. I’ll see you on Thursday.

Before you go, please take a moment to rate today’s newsletter and tell us how we did.

Rick Adams
Founder, GoldBuzz
rick@goldbuzz.com