geek raised the question of my plans on re-exchanging my Euros back into US$. At the moment I haven't seen any evidence that a fundamental change has occurred which would indicate that foreign investment will once again start streaming back into the USA causing the US$ to gain relative value. Even at todays US$1.20/E, I'm still sticking with the Euros - I'll reconsider when the rate hits US$1.22/E perhaps. When it's clear that the US$ has broken it's downtrend (good evidence would be that the Fed officially raises interest rates), I'll definitely get out of Euros and US$ as well, and invest in a sector that profits from inflation (perhaps Capital One Financial - variable rate credit card company catering to sub-prime customers).
I'm still holding a fair amount of gold bars plus shares in a couple of very sound and profitable gold mining companies. However, the price of gold has come a long way in a short time, making me leery of increasing my investments in this sector. It's true that some of the smaller speculative gold mining company stocks may still have the potential for huge gains, but they have just as much chance of crashing and burning.
All in all I feel safest with investing for the short term in Hong Kong H shares of commodity companies right now. In fact I just increased my stake in Aluminum Corp. of China (ACH) last week. China's output of manufactured goods like cars, bicycles, refrigerators etc. can only continue to increase, and these all require massive amounts of commodities like aluminum and copper. The prices of copper and aluminum has risen, but like gold versus gold mining companies the profits of the companies processing these metals (and therefore their stock price) rises faster than the price of the metals themselves.
As a dividend play (remember that congress passed a law cutting taxes on dividends about in half!) I've been loading up on natural gas royalty stocks like NGT and SJT. These stocks pay 8%+ dividends right now and probably 6% after tax, plus the stock value has risen an additional 10+ plus in the last few weeks. I may have to "pull the trigger" once the heating season starts coming to an end and natural gas prices begin to drop.
Again, this is just the babbling of a big busted dancer, and should not be considered as investment advice.
