Funnily enough a mate and I developed a thing we call the "Silver Stackers Index". It basically works on the number of bullish posts compared to the number of bearish and also places emphasis on the type of positive hyterical posting (you know - it's going to the moon, only morons sell, it'll be $500 by year end, it doesn't matter how much you pay it will be worth more in a month, JPM is going down, manipulators are going broke, silver is no longer an industrial metal etc etc). It worked out to be pretty accurate although I would say it needs a bit of tweaking as it was probably 2 days late with it's final peak. Unfortunately we didn't have complete faith in it and we both pulled the plug on a lot of our silver at the $43-45 US/oz. I'm hoping it works in the opposite way as well (picking the bottom) but we'll see. malachii
Valid points. However the fact that he could write a book the way he did shows some pretty unique insight to my mind. i have to wonder where most of us would be today if it were not for Maloney's book? i know i'd be floating round like a rudderless inflateable out on the Pacific ... His calls have been on the money for years now, which would seem that he knows whats going on
No, the point is not that there are better or worse forums out there. Just that they don't get caught up in the silver hype the way this one does. Get enough people posting in a positive, excited manner on here and it can overwhelm the rest and overwhelm your emotions if you get caught up in it. Otoh, it means silver is surging (which is what I want), hence why I want to see it, but not participate in it. As for SS Index, lol, whether you are being ironic or not, Malachi, I'm not sure, but the idea of quantifying emotions into an index is kind of interesting. You might have to screen out YKY as an outlier though. :lol:
I'd say measuring sentiment is a very different kettle of fish compared to recording details of transactions. malachii, it's a very interesting concept. Another (more immediately measurable) statistic is the web analytics - for months the forum was ticking along at 20% growth in traffic monthly, for the past three months it's been 30% growth - that doesn't show sentiment however, just overall interest. But a "sentiment index" is of use to contrarians etc looking for signs of a top.
Ive been following chapman for years. Ive even subscribed to his newsletter for a few of them. Here's the facts. 1. Silver/Gold Permabull He's right when its going up - until the bend at the end. The most recent example is obvious "$50 wont be a problem". 2. 100% correct when gold/silver is going up. (like all permabulls). I made a tonne of cash following his advice thinking he was a genius at the time when I first started listening to him years ago. 3. When gold / silver corrects, its ALWAYS MANIPULATION. AL-FRIGGEN-WAYS. ALWAYS. Even its a $5 drop, hes like "They tried to take gold down today but could only get it down $5". 4. He offers his opinions for the right reasons. I think his heart is in the right place. 5. He bitches way too much about other commentators even when they are right, to save his face. 6. He's been saying the stock market will continue to go down since 6,600.. he's not once understood the inflation trade thats been going on for the last two years. Having said that - Do I respect his opinion? Yes. Do I take the above into consideration when he offers his opinion? Yes. I get the feeling with Bob he's seen a lot of stuff with the inner dealings of corruption at key levels and has magnified that into every minute of waking life. In short, a tad paranoid. But his heart is simply in the right place... which is why even I mostly disagree with either his sentiment nowadays, or more often, his reasoning... I still like the old cobber.
You got me there Hobo - i dont have any at this point in time. but here are some links to what he's been saying of late ... and i believe he's on the money in each case http://bobchapman.blogspot.com/2011/05/bob-chapman-warning-about-perth-mint.html http://bobchapman.blogspot.com/2011/05/bob-chapman-hsbc-is-naked-short-45-to-1.html http://bobchapman.blogspot.com/2011/05/bob-chapman-explains-silver-market.html http://bobchapman.blogspot.com/2011/05/bob-chapman-treasury-department-is.html
It was actually the posts that started listing the number of new members that got us thinking about how to measure the "emotion". I never thought of using the stats from web analytics. That would be interesting to plot and see if there is any correlation to silver price. Although I would have thought this would be a little slower to react, it wouldn't have the "whipsawing" that ours can display (due public holidays, weekends, quiet days, busy days etc). When I can be bothered I've been trying to work on a "smoothing" without effecting the data or it's relevance in the shorter term. Trying to incorporate some of the Guppy Multiple Moving Average sort of stuff - not successfully I might add. malachii
reminds me of a joke, how did the mathematician solve his constipation problem? he worked it out with a pencil.
Great ideas all around, especially if it could be applied to many forums to get a sense of where each stands at certain times in various markets. I think it would be great sociological data. To measure the emotion levels on the site via the emotion levels of posters you could develop a scale using a 1-10 rating linked to various words that the posters can choose from to rate their level of a particular emotion at the time that they are making that post. There would need to be some research into the best descriptive words to use to make the best use of the scales. Of course this is just off the top of my head without a lot of thought, so there will be a few holes in this concept. But as an example: eg: Poster types post then given option to go to rating scale and see choices of WORD A, B, C, D, E etc....which include descriptive words ranging from excitable to calm. Then the poster chooses to rate how they feel on a scale of 1-10 - preferably for all words so that contradictions can be catered for and also so that multiple states could be measured because some would not be mutually exclusive. The results could be graphed and further research could be done into the relationship between the self rated scores and the actual posts for comparison and indications of the emotional content of the words used. Care would need to be taken also about the choice of words because some words that people think describe emotions actually describe behaviours or other things. Anyway, just my two cents....
Great Ideas, however IF ALL PARTICIPANTS ARE AWARE OF IT THAN IT MAY/WILL INFLUENCE the choice of words in our posts. why not just make a vote thread where the question is Where is silver SPOT in 1 month, 4 months & 12 months relative to where it is now? * spot + a% ... where a is annualised return of 20% + *spot + b% ... where b is annualised return of 7% + * flat * spot - x% ... where x is annualised loss of -7% * spot -y% ...where y is annualised loss of -20%
