re:hdr not so bad best yet to come Boom not over yet according...

re:hdr not so bad best yet to come Boom not over yet according to this article, Good luck to all.

Hello All

This will take a few minutes to read - we are still in a BULL market!

The recent pullback should be viewed as a buying opportunity, stocks we
have a BUY include:
- AMP (AMP)
- BHP Billiton (BHP)
- Alumina (AWC)
- Woodside (WPL)
- Onesteel (OST)
- CSR Limited (CSR)

Please call me to discuss further.

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> Commodities
> Best is yet to come, says superbull
> Jim Rogers, George Soros' former right-hand man, reckons the boom
> could last another 16 years
> Nils Pratley
> Tuesday June 6, 2006
> Guardian
> It was in 1999 - when the investment world was still bewitched by the
> supposed "new economy" - that Jim Rogers, the former right-hand man to
> George Soros, coined the phrase, "The next big thing is things."
> Buy the old economy, he said - everything from gold to oil to wheat.
> While you're at it, sell the US dollar, he added, arguing that it was
> a currency in decline.
> The timing of his investment call could hardly have been better. The
> hottest debate in the financial world now is whether the price of
> "things" - or commodities - is a bubble to match the excesses of the
> dotcom years.
> Gold has risen from $250 an ounce to $640. The price of oil, which had
> fallen as low as $10 a barrel, edged up to $72 a barrel yesterday, as
> Iran suggested that any western action over its nuclear enrichment
> programme could hit supplies.
> The other hot debate is whether the dollar, having declined for five
> years, is about to fall off a cliff - dragged over by the debts of the
> US government and American consumers.
> In other words, Rogers has made a lot of money since 1999.
> Readers of the Guardian could have done the same, he points out. The
> New York-based investor had espoused these views in an interview
> published in these pages in July 2004, when the first leg of the
> commodity bull market had been up and running. "Remember," he said
> then, "that the second leg is wonderful, and the third leg is
> spectacular. In the fourth leg, there is dancing in the streets, and
> in the fifth leg, people are hysterical and everything is skyrocketing
> every day."
> The prime reason for seeking him out again was to ask where he thinks
> we are now. Copper, for example, has almost doubled in value since the
> start of this year, to about $8,000 a tonne. Rises of 8% and even 10%
> have been seen in single days, bringing to mind Rogers' description of
> his "fifth leg" - "hysterical" and "skyrocketing". So, is this the
> end?
> "Looking back at previous bull markets in commodities, the shortest
> has lasted 15 years and the longest has lasted 23 years," says Rogers.
> "This one started in early 1999, so if it's going to last 18 years or
> so, we are a third of the way. That's not a prediction, I'm just
> pointing out what history would indicate: that this bull market will
> end some time between 2014 and 2022."
> This statement will strike many as irresponsible. The theory that
> metals prices are displaying bubble-like characteristics is a pretty
> solid consensus in the financial establishment.
> Credibility
> Rogers is having none of it. "Where is the copper coming from that's
> going to drive down the price of copper and keep it down? Where are
> the mines? All these people talking about a bubble are the same people
> who missed the move completely and were buying dotcom stocks, so I
> don't give them much credibility. I suggest it would be better to
> listen to someone who was saying, 'Buy commodities', in 1999.
> "How can you say it's a bubble when silver is 75% below its all-time
> high? Copper, when you adjust for inflation, is not at an all-time
> high. And oil, when you adjust for inflation, is far below its
> all-time high. Where's the oil going to come from? Nobody can give me
> an answer, including Shell, Exxon, Chevron. They're out there looking
> for oil, and they don't know where it's coming from." It is
> well-accepted that oil and mining firms under-invested in exploration
> in the 1990s. Low prices are never an incentive to look for more of
> anything. High prices encourage exploration and investment, but it can
> take a decade to bring a find to production. The miners would love to
> cash in on current prices but, with short supplies of everything from
> dumper-truck wheels to oil for lamps, it is a struggle to dig faster.
> However, even Rogers, the superbull, admits that commodities are not a
> one-way bet in the short term.
> "There will definitely be consolidations along the way," he says. "In
> the 1970s, gold went down by 50% in two years and then it rose by
> 850%. That sort of thing happens in bull markets." The cause of a
> correction - or consolidation, as Rogers calls it - could be anything,
> he argues, from a slowdown in China to a bird flu outbreak in Germany.
> "Something always causes consolidations and some of them will be
> dramatic. It could go down 20%, 30%, 40%, but I'm not going to try to
> time it because the bull market will still be there. Oil went down 50%
> in 2000 and has since risen 500%. Some people will be scared by
> consolidations and will get out. I think they're mistaken. I'm not
> selling anything. This bull market's got another 10 to 15 years to
> go."
> To sceptical ears, that sounds horribly reminiscent of some of the
> wild declarations of dotcom gurus who spotted a good thing but not the
> subsequent crash.
> Rogers, 63, is rich enough to do his own thing. Having worked with
> Soros to found one of the first and most successful hedge funds,
> Quantum, in 1973, he retired at 37 to manage his money. But it is only
> fair to point out that most other long-term bulls of commodities
> accept that prices are infected by speculative money. Their advice
> would be to wait for a correction before stepping into the market.
> Opportunities
> Rogers thinks the best opportunities in commodities lie not with
> metals. "Agricultural commodities are the most attractive," he says.
> "Sugar is 80% below its all-time high. Maize is 60% below its all-time
> high - so is cotton. Adjusted for inflation, some of these commodities
> are 80%, 90% below their all-time highs.
> "The hectares devoted to wheat have been declining for 30 years. The
> world has consumed more food than it has produced for the past five
> years, and that's the first time in recorded history that that's
> happened. We've had no worldwide drought for several years. I don't
> know if we'll have one again, but I know what happened in the 1960s
> and 1970s when we had droughts with low stocks of nutrition. The price
> of sugar went up 47-fold in an eight-year period."
> Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006