Boom times for gold miners

One despised asset class that MoneyWeek has long been bullish on has done rather well. John Stepek explains why he's sticking with gold miners.

So much for the Masters of the Universe. Following the extremely bearish start to the year, Goldman Sachs has already had to ditch five out of six of its "top trades" for 2016. Strong dollar? The US currency has stalled. Rising US inflation hopes? Not now that everyone's stressing about deflation. Tighter "spreads" between Italian and Germany bond yields? Not with the state European banks are in.

The investment bank fudged its withdrawal by noting that these were short-term trades and it still thinks its rationale will turn out correct in the longer run but it just shows that market timing isn't easy, even for a bank whose alumni run half of the world's central banks.

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.