Secret Golden Opportunity To Protect Your Wealth

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Welcome to the Money Tree Investing Podcast. Stock market, wealth, personal finance, value stocks. Invest in your life.

**Kirk Chisholm** (0:10)
Hello, Smart Money Tree Podcast listeners. Welcome to this week's show. My name is Kirk Chisholm. I'll be your host. And today, I'm joined with Dana Samuelson. How are you doing today, Dana?

**Dana Samuelson** (0:19)
I'm doing great, Kirk. Thanks for having me.

**Kirk Chisholm** (0:21)
Great. Glad to have you on. So tell us a bit about your background.

**Dana Samuelson** (0:24)
Well, I'm a 45-year precious metals dealer and market veteran. It's my entire career since getting out of college in 1980
I got out of college with a German degree and was completely unhireable.
Like any college graduate in 2009, it was during the roar in the late 70s when inflation was sky high, interest rates were sky high.
I got a lucky break. I went to work in a vault, counting, shipping and weighing the physical products at the tail end of the very first precious metals boom because I could be trusted. And after doing that for two years, I got an even luckier break. Jim Blanchard, who had the biggest mail order coin company in the country, hired me to be a vintage gold and silver US coin appraiser. So I spent two years looking at vintage US gold and silver coins and learned how to appraise them. And when the buyer would go to trade shows, I'd go up to the trading desk as a substitute trader. I was pretty good with people and had a good head for numbers. And I was moved up to the trading desk, where in the mid to late 80s, I got to spend 40, 50 million dollars of Jim's money with the industry. And that is really what set me on my course, the contacts that I made back then. I finally had enough gumption to start my own company, American Gold Exchange, in 1998, at the bottom of the market.
As it turns out, for the first half of my career, watching gold and silver prices was kind of like watching paint dry. For most of that time, gold was trading between $300 and $500 an ounce. And in the last 22 years, since about 2004, things have gotten a lot more interesting. Gold is just a rock, so it's influenced by external events. And I love what the daily news cycle is, what's moving the markets. It's been very interesting for me. That's the nut of it in my career.

**Kirk Chisholm** (2:14)
Great timing on your part. I mean, that was the very bottom of the market and no one liked gold. It was the barbarous relic. And it was, I think, 97 is when Buffett bought silver and then sold it.

**Dana Samuelson** (2:30)
Yeah, he bought a lot in London. He sidestepped the New York market back then because of what happened to the Hunt brothers in the late 80s when the COMEX raised the rates on them and broke their position. So he actually bought physical in London, about $5 an ounce. He was way ahead of the curve.

**Kirk Chisholm** (2:44)
But I think he did it as an arbitrage. I don't remember at the time. I just remember it was like, he's buying silver. Like, what the hell? I think it was some sort of arbitrage thing that he got away with and then he sold it. Like he didn't hold it, which that would have been a good trade for him. But I think he missed that one too.

**Dana Samuelson** (2:59)
Well, he's done pretty well. You can't argue too much with those overall results.

**Kirk Chisholm** (3:03)
He did well up until the 2000s. I think since his performance has been lackluster and compared to what he did prior. Prior, he was a rock star. I think since it's been a little lackluster. But anyway, we saw a historic rise in gold from 1998, 1999 up until 2011
And then it kind of went to sleep for a while. And now we're starting to see another historic rise up until like January of this year. But what do you attribute those to? Like what do you attribute those huge runs to? Because sometimes it takes off and then sometimes it does nothing.

**Dana Samuelson** (3:36)
Well, fundamentally, gold tracks are debt higher. That's the most basic correlation over the longer term.
In 2005, we had $7 trillion in debt. In 2015, we had $17 trillion. And now, 2025, last year, we were up to $38 trillion. So we've doubled our debt twice in the last 20 years. Gold's tracking that. It also does well in times of economic uncertainty. It climbs a wall of worry. And we've had a couple of episodes where there's been a lot to worry about. Gold tends to be an emotional reaction to negativity in markets.