Happy Tuesday, GoldBuzzers!

Today's Take Action Tuesday hands the mic to one of your own: Neil B., an Insider member in Toronto who's spent years buying picks from paid services across the metals space and has the account statements to show for it, good and bad.

He's built a simple system for holding through corrections without losing his nerve, and he's let me share it here, including the positions that went nowhere for a decade. There's also a money-saving tip inside for every Canadian reader buying US stocks.

Let’s get into it. ⬇️

Gold finished Monday little changed just above $4,050 an ounce, while silver quietly clawed back above $58, up about one percent on the day. Two forces spent the session pulling in opposite directions.

Safe-haven demand cooled after President Trump paused planned strikes on Iran and said fresh talks would begin Monday, a move he credited to pressure from allies including Saudi Arabia. Oil dropped on the news, which took some heat out of inflation worries and the higher-for-longer rate story.

Tehran denied any negotiations were underway. Pulling the other way, the US dollar sank to its weakest level since mid-June after Washington and Tokyo confirmed they'd jointly stepped in to prop up the yen, the first coordinated move of its kind since 1998, and a softer dollar tends to be a friend to anything priced in it.

The tug-of-war left both metals close to where they started. The next catalyst likely comes from this week's run of US labor data, capped by Friday's nonfarm payrolls report.

I get a lot of reader mail, and some of it deserves to be shared with a wider audience. This week it's Neil B., a GoldBuzz INSIDER member since launch day, and he’s given me permission to share some of his story today.

Neil works in financial services for a large insurance company in Toronto, earns well, and has been moving money from every paycheck into his investment accounts for years, mostly into gold and silver stocks recommended by the various paid services he's subscribed to along the way.

Three accounts, three jobs

Neil's core idea is simple: most investors struggle because they ask one account to do several different jobs at once.

"Most people run everything out of a single account and expect it to do five different things," he told me. "They tell themselves a stock is going to be a five-year hold, then when it drops 30 percent they panic and sell at the bottom. Or a short-term trade turns against them so they change their mind and say it’s now part of their long-term retirement plan.”

Neil says that he repeated these mistakes for years because he was trying to trade everything inside one account.

His fix is to split his money by purpose:

"Every time I allocate money now, I ask what job it's doing before anything else. Is this a quick trade, or something I'll still own at 70? Once I've answered that, the decision mostly makes itself."

Neil still sells. He also does some short-term trading but each account has its own rules, so a correction in one doesn't set off alarms in the others. "If you're trying to sidestep every dip, you've stopped investing and started trading, whether you admit it to yourself or not. Nobody catches every top and every bottom. Not me, and not the professionals either."

He points at the Nasdaq. Anyone who bought near the lows over twenty years ago still sat through corrections lasting months and occasionally years. None of them ended the bull market.

Ten years of dead money

Now for the uncomfortable part. Some of Neil's largest positions came from other paid service recommendations years ago, and they've gone almost nowhere in a decade.

He started buying McEwen (MUX) around $20. It's about $17 today. He started buying Sibanye Stillwater (SBSW) around $8 back in 2016. It’s still over $8 but it’s been a violent rollercoaster ride and is down 40% on the year. Almaden Minerals, which he calls his least successful long-term hold, he averaged down all the way from over $2 to 25 cents.

Neil said he was shocked when he checked those names against the INSIDER miner rankings and found that every one of them showed below-average fundamentals. His plan is to liquidate some of these holdings into the next recovery and rotate into names ranked far higher, and he told me the rankings will be a fixture in how he invests from here on.

Even his best hold has humbled him along the way. He started buying Eldorado Gold around $20, liquidated much of it between $10 and $5 for a steep loss, then significantly rebuilt the position starting around $10 from 2020 onward. It briefly hit $50 in January and trades over $30 today. It’s now his largest single position and yet it doesn't currently crack the top ten of our gold majors rankings, which he wasn't expecting.

The Bitcoin plan

Neil also owns Bitcoin at perhaps five percent of his net worth. He said what got his attention was INSIDER’s Bitcoin Min Risk signal turning bearish around $114,000 last August. Bitcoin pushed higher into October, then rapidly fell by roughly half to the low $60,000s. He's hoping for another Min Risk buy signal this fall and plans to be ready.

On custody, his reasoning was hard to argue with. Crypto exchanges can go bankrupt or freeze withdrawals, and hot wallets sit on laptops that can get hacked. As we’ve just seen with last week’s appalling Coldcard incident, hardware wallets can ship with a bug that exposes your seed phrase and many people lost their entire holdings overnight. His conclusion: "I've made my peace with it. I'll add through a Bitcoin ETF and sleep at night."

The 1.5 percent tax you didn't know you were paying

One more lesson from Neil, this one particularly for Canadian readers: "Never buy US stocks or ETFs straight out of a Canadian dollar account. I did it for years without thinking about it and wondered why my trades were so often underwater." He worked out he was paying roughly 1.5 percent in FX fees on every buy and every sell, before even counting the bid-ask spread. His advice is to convert once into a US dollar account inside your brokerage, which most of the big firms now allow.

I'd add one more tool: Norbert's Gambit. The Global X US Dollar Currency ETF trades in two versions, DLR (quoted in Canadian dollars) and DLR.U (quoted in US dollars), but they're the same fund holding the same thing: US cash. If you buy DLR with your loonies, then sell DLR.U, the proceeds land in your account as US dollars.

At Questrade and Interactive Brokers this works directly online. Total cost is typically 0.1 to 0.3 percent instead of 1.5, and because the fund just holds US cash, you're taking essentially no market risk while the trade settles. On any conversion above $5,000 or so, it's the difference between paying retail and paying wholesale and can make a massive difference on larger accounts.

Neil plans to retire within five years, and given how expensive Toronto has become, he told me he expects he and his wife will leave the city when he does. He’s the first to admit that he’s made many mistakes along the way, but he’s now much better prepared for the next leg of the bull market.

Whatever the next five years bring, he'll meet it with three accounts, each doing exactly one job.

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