There is nothing wrong with metals. It is we who don't have a real perception of them. The regular investor who is so equity-focused, a bit fixed income-focused is a bit aware of gold and oil prices and that's where it stops. When it comes to commodities or say metals, one has to cross the bridge.

Benner’s Prophecies – Future up and down in prices was written in 1875. Samuel Benner was a prosperous farmer wiped out financially by the 1873 panic. He turned to wheat farming in Ohio and took up the statistical study of price movements as a hobby to find, if possible, the answers to the recurring ups and downs in business. He noted that highs of the business tend to follow a repeating 8-9-10 yearly pattern.

Conviction is a strange thing, it tests you, your determination, your homework, your skill, how individual you are and how patient you are wearing the fool's crown. It does one more thing, it makes you extremely individual, probably alone (when you are right), screaming sell at a top and buy at a bottom. But then markets are strange beings, the top is followed by another top and bottom by another low. The line between conviction and foolishness becoming blurred every time the prices move against you

This is a harsh reality, but masses don’t understand cycles and the uncanny asset linkages. The fact is that we at Orpheus too are also scratching the surface. Though there are market timing models, timing the market in future with a small time window of a few days, is a skill we look up to.

October lows have extreme sentiments linked to them making them great multi-month, multi-year and in some cases multi-decade bottoms. We are nearing October 2008. If this looks like just another calendar date, think again.

These are the famous words of Geologist Kenneth Deffeyes voiced in FEB 2006. Though the expert reiterated later saying that the words he said were a bit harsh, the quote anyway found its way to the top list of 2007 quotes. Books and cover stories highlight a mass psychology extreme.