Silver: The trend is obviously up! The only question is, do we consider silver to be in a channel going up at a reasonable 40% per year, with a temporary breakout as we had with platinum and palladium due to squeezes, or can we really believe silver is a new channel heading up at a raging 130%/year.
Platinum: I don't know. I'm inclined to leave the channel the way it is, and blame the breakout on some yet unnamed cause. Platinum has recovered and is back in the -80% channel. The Yen really gives no clues. The trend in the Yen is indeterminate at the moment.
Palladium: Finally catching up with platinum. Although the steep decline has been interrupted, it has a long ways to fall before it catches up with platinum. It definitely seems weaker than platinum at the moment. I've moved the channel bottom up for now, but my guess is palladium will drop faster than this channel predicts.
Gold: POSSIBLE TREND REVERSAL! Yes, I know, gold has barely managed to reach the upper border of the steep -80% downward channel. HOWEVER, for five days in a row the weighted basket of currencies of gold buying countries have gone up vs. the dollar. And the price of gold in US$ has tracked it right up. This is the first time since FEBRUARY 1996 that this "world gold currency" has gone up vs. the dollar to this extent. Yes, of course, this recovery is barely a blip in the overall drop of the world gold currency, and, yes, it could reverse again. And it may just be a recovery from the recent steep drop, and then will again resume its relentless downward trend. However, if the world gold currency just makes a V-bottom, reversing again after it reaches its longer term downward trend line, gold will rally with it, reaching $310-315 sometime around late January, early February. In my opinion, this is quite a likely scenario ... and it can get much better than this, if other factors positive to gold kick in! In anticipation of gold continuing its recent rally, I show a possible channel bottom, at a 130%/year slope, as silver is currently moving.
EB - Proceed with extreme caution!
( NZ Herald December 19, 1997 )
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Doug Dibley had one of the worst jobs at Gallipoli: picking up his broken and bloodied comrades in a battle that claimed many young lives. But the 101-year-old former stretcher-bearer met his Maker yesterday in a far more serene surroundings - at a Rotorua rest-home, with two sons at his bedside.
He was New Zealands last living link to the Gallipoli campaign, which claimed the lives of more than 11,000 Anzac soldiers.
Australias last original Gallipoli campaigner, Ted Matthews, died in Sydney last week, also aged 101.
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SUN SETS ON DAWN OF A NATION
It was our coming of age, and it was our loss of innocence. It was the moment when the worlds newest dominion, not yet a decade old, staked its claim to nationhood; and it lasted nine long and bloody months.
The name of an arid and steep peninsular in Turkey is burned into our national consciousness. And the death of Doug Dibley, the last New Zealand veteran of the long, slow bloodbath we know as Gallipoli, breaks the last living link with a defining moment in our island story.
For the 19-year old who volunteered to help at Trentham military hospital and soon found himself hoisting wounded bodies into stretchers at the front line, Gallipoli was a rude awakening to the horrors of war. And 80-odd years later, Doug Dibley hadnt forgotten.
No one wins in the end, he said last year. The Great War took the best of our young men, and look how many came back maimed and broken.
In successive waves over nine months, beginning on April 25, 1915, 8556 New Zealanders landed on the small beachhead that would become known as Anzac Cove. When they were evacuated in December with a military efficiency that, ironically, was utterly absent from the campaign, they left behind the bodies of 2721, or almost one in three.
Barely 265 of those men lie in marked graves. The rest lay where they fell, their bones bleached by the fierce Turkish sun. They went out of the trenches and simply disappeared.
Gallipoli was by no means the bloodiest action New Zealanders saw in the First World War: in 21 days 7900 of our men died at the Somme, and in four hours at Passchendaele 2400 fell.
But at that time we were numb as a nation to the idea that our best and brightest were dying on the other side of the world. Gallipoli delivered the first, stunning news to a country which had believed in war as a brief adventure, in which victory was sure.
The naivety of believing that the Empire was always right and we could never be defeated came a gutser at Gallipoli because we lost it, says Dr Christopher Pugsley, a military historian who has written a book on the campaign. Gallipoli was a key event in our coming of age as a nation. Such a transformation doesnt happen in a moment, of course, but in a process unfurled by time.
The first New Zealand Expeditionary Force that left in October 1914 was a carefree band of lads bursting with provincial pride. But, whether playing football in Egypt or fighting for their lives in Turkey, they instinctively buried parochial rivalries.
They became compatriots determined to the better than the men they fought alongside. For the first time they knew and they would pay with the lives of a generation for the knowledge what it was to be a New Zealander.
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They shall not grow old,
As we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun
and in the morning
We will remember them.
Laurence Binyon
For the Fallen