The Dollar Vigilante by Jeff Berwick, Ed Bugos

JEFF BERWICK
Jeff Berwick

Anarcho-Capitalist. Libertarian. Freedom fighter against mankind’s two biggest enemies, the State and the Central Banks. Jeff Berwick is the founder of The Dollar Vigilante and host of the popular video podcast, Anarchast. Jeff is a prominent speaker at many of the world’s freedom, investment and cryptocurrency conferences including his own, Anarchapulco, as well as regularly in the media including CNBC, Bloomberg and Fox Business. Jeff also posts exclusive content daily to the new blockchain based social media network, Steemit.

Jeff’s background in the financial markets dates back to his founding of Canada’s largest financial website, Stockhouse.com, in 1994. In the late ‘90s the company expanded worldwide into 8 different countries and had 250 employees and a market capitalization of $240 million USD at the peak of the “tech bubble”. To this day more than a million investors use Stockhouse.com for investment information every month.

Jeff was the CEO from 1994 until 2002 when he sold the company. Afterwards, Berwick went forth to live on and travel the world by sailboat but sank his boat in a storm off the coast of El Salvador. After being saved clinging to his surfboard with nothing but a pair of surfing shorts left of all his material possessions he decided to “live nowhere” and travel the world as spontaneously as possible with one overarching goal: See and understand the world with his own eyes, not through the lens of the media.

He went on to visit nearly 100 countries over five years and did and saw things that no education could ever teach. He met and spoke with a plethora of amazing people, from self-made billionaires to some of the brightest minds in finance – as well as entrepreneurs from a broad range of backgrounds and locations from tech companies in southern China to resource developers in Thailand, Russia and Chile. He also read everything he could find on how the world really works… politically and financially. A pursuit he continues to this day.

That education led him to become one of the biggest proponents of the Permanent Traveler/Prior Taxpayer (PT) Theory.

He expatriated, long ago from his country of birth, Canada, and considers himself a citizen of the world. He has lived in numerous locales since including Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Bangkok and Acapulco, Mexico.
ED BUGOS
EdBugos2
Mr. Bugos is the Senior Analyst at the Dollar Vigilante. He is an Austrian economist and has been a dedicated investment professional since 1989.
Ed started his distinguished career as a stockbroker on Howe Street at one of Vancouver’s leading brokerage firms. He mentored under one of the best exploration and spec stock analysts on the west coast who made his mark covering the discovery of diamond mines in the NWT during the nineties (when skepticism about their existence there still abound). Ed made money for his clients financing diamond, nickel, and gold exploration companies throughout his brokerage career, as well as trading futures and options.

He was one of the only gold and oil futures traders in Vancouver (at the height of the “cult of equity”) in 1999; he left the brokerage industry early in 2000 warning his clients that the tech bubble and “strong dollar” would burst -leading to a secular bull market in gold, eventually leading to a repeat of the 1970’s style stagflation in the decades ahead. As part of the first genres of the investing counter culture that went online in the early days of the internet, Mr. Bugos launched The Goldenbar Report, a subscription driven gold and currency digest, where he predicted that gold would go to $2000 by 2013, that the US dollar would halve, and that US equity markets had seen their best days for the next decade (he called for Dow 7000 in the tech bubble fallout). He couldn’t write that story as a stockbroker. In subsequent years, through to 2006, Ed made many great calls resulting in an un-leveraged broad based asset allocation returning over 20% per annum without a down year.

At the end of 2006 he foresaw another crisis coming but was no longer optimistic about gold shares, which he thought were expensive at the time. Having just had his first child he went on sabbatical for the next year.

His last recommendation when winding down the Goldenbar Report in September of 2006 was for clients to allocate up to a 45% exposure to a short position against the equity averages – largely the financial sector “XLF” – 40% to a long position in bullion (physical or GLD); and a residual core position (<15%) in gold equities.

In 2007, seeing the crisis around the corner, Mr. Bugos joined Agora Financial to compile a portfolio of gold stocks for investors to buy during the meltdown. The service was launched in March 2008 and lasted through to the first few months of 2009 where he was able to recommend stocks like Kirkland Gold, First Majestic Silver, and Guyana Goldfields at under $3… all of which subsequently soared in the