Precious metals are booming!

The European Central Bank did it, the Bank of England did it, The US Federal Reserve did it and yesterday the Bank of Japan just done it.

As the chart above shows, gold and silver responded accordingly, soaring 13.21% and 24.75% respectively since the global easing began in earnest in late July. The [...]

Europe on the edge of recession, both Australia and Hong Kong at risk as is The United States. Both gold and silver soared during August on hopes of September’s FOMC meeting. The chart above shows gold ($GOLD, black line) and silver ($SILVER, red line) daily during the month of August, 2012, up 4.59% and [...]

Another run-up in silver?

Silver, daily, October 2010 to April 2012, CME margin changes noted as (digit)

Last year we saw the emergence of bubble like pricing in Silver; the chart above shows the spot price of Silver over the last 18 months, and the sharp run-up in prices culminating in a high on April 29th – but [...]

Debt, debt and more debt

The problem with numbers, especially big numbers is after a while we get desensitised. A billion here, ten billion there, hundred billion or so on top, after a while nobody is paying attention because there are so many zeroes! So I thought I’d present US Total Government debt a little differently; the chart above [...]

Where is your money in 2012 (pt 3)?

Silver, Oil, Gold and the Renmbi against the S&P 500, year to date performance as of March 29th, 2012

With the end of the first quarter approaching, I thought I’d finish off my review of possible places to put your money in 2012. The chart above shows the performance of metals – Silver, Gold [...]

What’s driving the price of Silver?

Spot silver, January 2011 to Februrary 2012, daily

The oversupply of silver is well documented, and yet the pale metal is up almost 20% in 2012, outperforming Gold (+10.31%), the S&P 500 (+8.24%) and Oil (+5.04%) – why? Rather than one there are many factors and I’ll try to list them in order of [...]

As you might have guessed, my name is Dave Coker. I'm an ex-expatriate New Yorker who has lived in London since 1997.

I've worked in Investment Banking since the early 1980's, starting my career in New York with Dow Jones . I next moved to Deutsche Bank, where I spent the bulk of my career as Vice President of Global Risk Management. While at Moody's I was responsible for Professional Services in Europe, The Middle East and Africa, and was responsible globally for resources. While at ABN AMRO I was Global Programme Manager Risk Management Technology. Needless to say, I've seen Investment Banking and financial services from a wide variety of perspectives.

I take a long view towards finance and economics. I believe past events - the study of economic history - can help us understand current market events.

Internationally educated, I'm completing a PhD in Finance (Zurich), currently hold an MSc in Quantitative Finance (London), an MBA (London), studied Mathematics & Computer Science at the Undergraduate level (New York), and, most importantly, I've been a lifelong Student of the Markets.

I currently write and sell market commentary to several banks and hedge funds, consult on Credit Risk to a Global Tier 1 Investment Bank, and teach finance at The University of Westminster in London.

I'm a polished and effective public speaker, sometimes presenting on finance as many as six or eight times a week. I've also made several media appearances over the past two years, once again on the subject of finance.
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Observations of a financial nature.