BEST OF JIM COOK

September 19, 2006

FAITH

When you make a financial commitment it is, in reality, an act of faith. You have faith in your own judgment, or if you rely on the advice of others, you have faith in that person’s opinion. If you buy a stock based on the comments you hear on financial TV, you have faith in the person giving that advice.

Much of what we do in life is based on faith. Our daily activities require faith that the outcomes we hope for will be there. Faith is a necessary ingredient to progress. Without it, no one would attempt anything new. Trailblazers and pioneers wouldn’t exist. Faith is the key ingredient to success. Faith is the antidote for lack of courage and fear. Faith is a mandatory ingredient to life itself and most especially a fruitful life. Faith is of the first importance in achieving financial security and peace of mind.

When we send out our newsletter advocating silver, we are attempting to secure your faith in our judgment. When you read one of Ted Butler’s essays and you buy silver, you are acting on faith. In this case, you have faith in Mr. Butler’s knowledge and understanding. Our current task is to infuse you with enough of Mr. Butler’s insights to encourage your faith in his judgment.

Some of our readers reach this threshold and buy silver. I personally have bought silver based on Mr. Butler’s advice. More significantly, however, I have staked the success of my company on his advice. If my faith were to be misplaced, it would be ruinous to my financial security. Unquestionably it’s true that faith can be misplaced. When I first connected with Mr. Butler, silver was trading at slightly over $4.00 an ounce. A fairly prominent newsletter came out recommending selling silver and also buying put options on silver. The author claimed that silver was "more common than cockroaches." He expected silver to go down dramatically and you could profit by selling it short. That advice backfired badly. People who had faith in that writer suffered painful losses.

Life serves up abundant setbacks, struggles and disappointments. The most important advice for handling these predicaments were penned years ago by the success writer, Napoleon Hill. "Every adversity, every failure and every heartache carries with it the seed of an equivalent or a greater benefit." To accept that powerful fact simply requires a greater level of faith.

These setbacks do, indeed, give us a better handle on who we might place our faith in when it comes to making financial commitments. Disappointments sharpen our judgment. On the other hand, following someone’s advice to a successful conclusion increases our level of faith in that person.

So far, so good with Ted Butler. My faith in his views has been magnified because the price of silver has tripled since I first interviewed him. His accomplishments are impressive. He made the dubious practice of gold and silver leasing understandable, and he roundly condemned it as an accident waiting to happen. Subsequently, major mining companies took a shellacking, and huge losses still haunt mining companies that employed this practice.

He pointed out a large insurance company that was a dominant short seller in silver and questioned their tactics publicly. Before long they appeared to vanish from the silver market. He explained that the price of silver was set almost exclusively through COMEX trading. He showed that tech funds trading through computerized programs in commodities were the dominant silver buyers on the COMEX. He showed how they were getting crushed by the big dealers who were short. He questioned how long they could sustain such losses and, sure enough, in the last few months many have left the silver market. He predicted that the price of silver would rise and it did. He preached about the possibility of delivery default on the commodity exchanges and it happened recently with nickel. His prognostications, explanations and clear insights have generated a large following and caused many people to buy silver for the first time.