IJin Insight

You may not own a single gram of gold. But the institutions that print the money you hold are buying it at the fastest pace in fifty years. That is the news worth reading twice. Gold is trading above $4,800 per ounce. A year ago it was below $3,000. Two years ago it was below $2,400. The move is not driven by retail jewelry demand or crypto refugees looking for a safer harbor. It is driven by the largest and most consistent buyer class on earth: central banks. In 2024, central banks purchased 1,092 tonnes of gold — a generational record. In 2025, they bought 863 tonnes — still the third consecutive year above 800. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, they added another 244 tonnes, up 17% from the previous quarter, with Poland (31 tonnes) and Uzbekistan (25 tonnes) leading. Goldman Sachs has since revised its January 2026 estimate to 66 tonnes — five times higher than initially reported. A World Gold Council survey found that 95% of central banks expect to either maintain or increase t...

Everyone talks about inflation. Fewer understand deflation. Almost nobody is ready for stagflation. These three words describe entirely different economic environments. They affect your job, your savings, your mortgage, and your investments in opposite ways. If you don't understand the differences, you cannot protect your money. So here they are — plainly, with real examples. This post was first published in April 2026 and updated at the end of July. The April reading is preserved as written, and the last section grades it against what actually happened. That grade is the most useful part of the post. Inflation: Prices Rise, Money Shrinks Inflation means the general price level is going up. The same dollar buys less than it did a year ago. Your rent goes up. Your groceries cost more. A cup of coffee that was $3 last year is $3.50 now. The purchasing power of your cash is eroding. Moderate inflation — around 2% per year — is considered healthy. It means people are spending, business...

Yesterday a national stock index fell 12.63 percent in a single session. The trigger was not a war, a default, or a central bank. It was a report that a factory in another country had begun mass-producing a machine. Korea's KOSPI closed at 5,262.77 on July 29, 2026, after news that China had started mass production of domestic deep-ultraviolet chipmaking equipment. The index is down roughly 34 percent from its June peak of 9,114, and it fell about 23 percent across July alone — the worst month in its recorded history. Seven circuit breakers fired during those weeks. Somewhere around 250 trillion won of market value stopped existing. I live here. I do not own a single Korean stock, which is an odd place to watch this from — close enough to hear it and far enough to look at the mechanism instead of my own balance. And the mechanism is not really about Korea. One Piece of News Should Not Move a Whole Country Here is the part worth slowing down on. A single equipment announcement...

Two ETFs track the same underlying index. Over six months, the underlying climbs back to where it started — flat, on net. One ETF is up zero percent. The other is down thirty. Both are doing exactly what they were built to do. This is volatility decay, and it is the quietest predator in the retail ETF lineup. The 2x leveraged ETF, the 3x leveraged ETF, the inverse ETF — they all share one structural feature: they reset their leverage every trading day. That daily reset is the entire problem. It is not a flaw. It is the design. Here is the simple math. Suppose an underlying index sits at 100. Monday it falls 10% to 90. Tuesday it rises 11.1% back to 100. The underlying is flat over the two days. Now apply 2x daily leverage. Monday, the 2x ETF falls 20% from 100 to 80. Tuesday, it rises 22.2% from 80 to 97.78. The underlying is back at 100. The 2x ETF is at 97.78. Over a flat two-day stretch, the leveraged product lost 2.2%. Apply 3x leverage to the same sequence. Monday, −30% (1...

In April 2026, the Nasdaq had its worst day in over a year — down more than 4% in a single session, as a chip-stock sell-off erased upward of a trillion dollars of market value in an afternoon. Days like that are exactly why the most famous rule in investing is also the most ignored. "Rule No. 1: Never lose money. Rule No. 2: Never forget Rule No. 1." Warren Buffett has said this so many times it sounds like a bumper sticker. People nod, smile, and then immediately go buy a 3x leveraged ETF or dump their savings into a meme coin at the top. The rule sounds obvious. It is not obvious. It is mathematics — and the math is brutal. This post is about one thing: why avoiding large losses matters more than chasing large gains, and why the numbers prove it. The Recovery Table Nobody Wants to See When you lose money, you don't just need to make it back. You need to make back more than you lost — and the gap gets exponentially worse as the loss grows. Here's the table: Loss ...

The last post was about the cost of never starting. This one is about a cost that arrives after you start — the price of stepping out for a while. It is the most reasonable-sounding mistake in investing. The news turns grim, the account is red, and the sensible move seems to be simple: move to the sidelines, let the storm pass, and come back when things settle. Nothing about that feels reckless. It feels like prudence. And it quietly does more damage to long-run returns than most of the things people actually worry about. The reason is a piece of market arithmetic that almost nobody is told: the market's very best days are not spread evenly across the calendar. They are bunched up right next to its very worst ones. The reframe — being out is also a position We tend to think of investing as the action and sitting in cash as the absence of one. Buy, sell, rebalance — those feel like decisions. Waiting on the sidelines feels like a pause. It is not a pause. Being out of the mar...