>Luckily I'm invested across all three - agri, gold and renewables ...... Any thoughts?
Gold: I used to use gold as a bank account. Rather than hold cash in my brokerage account and wait for a buying opportunity I held pmgold:asx shares which is Perth mint gold warrants. Effectively you have bought government backed paper gold with your fiat currency. If the AUD crashes then you should do well. And I have. I don't believe that the world will go back to pre 1950s capitalism and use gold as a principle trading commodity. That privilege belongs to the USD$ and I still expect this century to be dominated by the US not China. While Australia is a vassal state of the US, we make much of our money selling to China. As a result I am bearish on the AUD. It's current strength is because of our good Covid status and I expect that to fade. PS if you do hold gold in the form of pmgold the vault fees are at the beginning of the year. Renewables: Not a big believer in renewables. As far as I can see they a waste of money and are only possible due to concessions by the government. The government does this to placate the religion which is green peace. You only need to look at Germany that went green in a big way and see that not only do they have the most expensive electricity they are also producing the most carbon dioxide per unity of electricity. They need to use the French nuclear fission reactors and the Russian gas pipelines to make it work. Germans are one of the richest and organised peoples on this earth. If they can't get it to work, what hope does the rest of the world have? We have done the experiment, it does not work.
I actively seek out people who think differently in this area, unfortunately they always fall over with the numbers and turn to hand wavium to try and convince me. This is not to say that there isn't a place of renewables, but it tends to be niche and limited. I pretty much see the technology, in the same way I see energy light saving bulbs, once implemented it will reduce overall power usage but you can only cover your roof with solar once, much like you can only replace all your incandescent light bulbs with led lights once. Total world wide energy usage will keep going up. Once we have put the technology where it actually works, like Australia and amusingly Texas we will still need another form of energy. I am looking forward to Elon's million mile EV battery to help change this reality.
The world runs on oil. 10% of agricultural input costs are oil. Not only do you have transport costs but things like fertilizer and pesticides come from oil products. So I have bought oil stocks to hedge agriculture. The idea is that if oil goes up then I do well with the oil investment, If oil goes down or negative then my agriculture stocks do well. I see this as a de-risking strategy.
To power our world, in the future, we can either go Nuclear fission (which is just not happening), oil with global warming or war with massive population destruction to get us below 2 billion mark (currently at 7.8 people) to make renewables effective. Currently we are on the oil path with promises to the greenies religious types that we are bringing in bridging technologies (Hydrogen) or promises that we will go carbon free in 2050. Easy promises to make when you know you won't be in power then. I hope Australia wakes up and smells the coffee before it's to late and goes nuclear. Not 1960s technology but the new SMR type which are mass produced in a factory, deployed and once depleted sent back to be recycled and reused at the factory that made them. I like the idea of shutting down the old coal stations and plugging in the SMRs on the old power station site. After all the electrical infrastructure is all there.
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