As we celebrate the holiday season after a challenging year, I am reminded that the most important gifts are love, friendship and goodwill. Alexander Green from InvestmentU shared that sentiment in his newsletter last week highlighting the wonderful story of how Charles Dickens overcame adversity to reshape the way many look at Christmas. Read Alex’s piece here.

This week I thought we’d take a moment to reflect on the eventful year it’s been for gold, natural resources and emerging markets by highlighting this year’s most popular commentaries and entries from my Frank Talk blog.

Here’s a list of what mattered most to readers in 2011.

1) BRIC Self Sufficiency Index – February 10

Sometimes a chart can tell the whole story. This interesting chart from Bank of America-Merrill Lynch showing the supply/demand fundamentals of several key industrial metals and basic materials attracted the most attention on my blog this year.

The dotted line in the chart represents a key tipping point. The resources to the left of the line are those the BRIC countries must obtain outside of their own borders to meet domestic demand. The BRICs produce an excess amount of the two metals to the right of the line and export the remaining amount to other countries.

These materials are the necessary elements needed for emerging nations to take the next steps in their development. You can see that the BRICs must rely on imports in order to meet demand for metallurgical coal, copper concentrate, thermal coal, iron ore, refined copper and uranium—implying higher prices for several years to come.

Click here to read full article

2) Understanding the Rise of China – February 3

Curiosity about China and the insightful words of Martin Jacques, author of When China Rules the World, led this post to the #2 spot.

Jacques says China is going to change the world in two fundamental respects. First, never before in the modern era has the largest economy in the world been that of a developing country. Second, for the first time in the modern era, the dominant country in the world will not be from the West.

Click here to watch Jacques’ full speech

3) Which Gold Miners Have Largest Upside – October 13

For much of the year, a prominent story in the gold sector was the performance gap between gold miners and climbing prices of the yellow metal (see #6), leading us to ask our readers which miners had the largest upside? My investment case for exploration and development miners, or juniors, was the subset’s near-record low price-to-NAV level.

Click here to read full article

4) Is Gold About to Have Its Status Upgraded? – June 17

With the global banking system set to approve the Basel III banking provisions, I explored the possible ramifications if the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) decided to upgrade gold to a Tier 1 asset.

Click here to read full article

5) Don’t Fear a Pullback in Prices – April 25

The last week of April we received our first glimpse of the volatility that would grip markets and investors throughout 2011. After S&P warned of a downgrade to U.S. debt, gold and oil rocketed higher. I cautioned you to be aware of the inevitable snapback that comes with these types of moves but said investors could use these pullbacks as an opportunity to “back up the truck.”

Sure enough, gold prices pulled back before beginning their climb toward $1,900 an ounce. However, it proved to be the high for oil prices, which fell below $80 a barrel in early October and currently sit just below $100 per barrel.

Click here to read full article

6) Will Gold Equity Investors Strike Gold? – June 20

As I referenced before, the story of the year for gold investors has been the underperformance of gold mining stocks compared with bullion. However, this wasn’t the case for all of 2011. The NYSE Arca Gold BUGS Index (HUI) had outperformed gold bullion through April, but the relative performance quickly reversed and the HUI trailed bullion by nearly 30 percent by mid-August.

This isn’t the first time gold bullion and gold equity prices have diverged. Gold equities underperformed gold bullion in 2000 and 2008 during times of extreme market negativity and uncertainty. These previous instances have been merely temporary setbacks and markets generally reverted back to their long-term trends.

Click here to read full article

7) How to Find Opportunities from Blood, Debt & Fears – September 6

This piece from September is one of my favorites of the year because it pops the notion the gold is in a bubble. Despite gold’s dramatic bull run over the last 10 years, the yellow metal is only twice as high as its 1980 price. In comparison to other economic yardsticks since 1980, this is miniscule. Ian McAvity, editor of Deliberations on World Markets, says that federal debt, the S&P 500 Index and even GDP has grown much faster than gold over that same timeframe.

The gross U.S. federal debt of $14.3 trillion is 17 times its 1980 level. In 1980, the S&P 500 was at 105; today, it trades around 1,100. A gold price of $1,808 seems paltry as it is only 2.5 times the 1980 high of $738.

McAvity extrapolates the relative growth rate of the yellow metal, indicating that if gold doubled from its current high, it “would nearly ‘catch up’ to GDP, while it might take a quadruple to match the S&P, or even a six-fold gain from here to catch the growth of debt.” Multiplying the largest of these figures by the current price of gold means prices could theoretically go to $10,800. By these standards, gold is hardly a bubble.

Click here to read full article

8) The 2011 Gold Season is Just Around the Corner – August 1

The gold season kicked off a month earlier this year as shenanigans on Capitol Hill and cultural buying pushed gold prices up a staggering 12 percent during the month of August.

September has traditionally been the beginning of the gift-giving season for gold. This is the time of year when gold jewelers are the busiest. The season for gold began with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan in August. Then came Diwali, known as “the festival of lights” in India, and we’re in the midst of Christmas here in the U.S.. Next will come Chinese New Year.

Click here to read full article

9) Debunking Gaddafi’s Gold – March 23

 When word got out the deposed dictator had a large pot of gold, many wondered whether that gold would be used to finance Gaddafi’s troops in a civil war. Our director of research John Derrick spoke with then CNBC host Erin Burnett about the unlikelihood of that happening.

Click to watch the interview

10) The Bedrock of the Gold Bull Rally – April 4

Naysayers started calling gold a bubble back when prices hit $250 an ounce and though gold’s bull market has tossed and flung the bubble callers around for almost a decade now, their voices have only gotten increasingly louder as prices broke through $1,000, $1,200, $1,500 and even hit $1,900 an ounce.

In this extensive piece, we dove into gold’s relatively small role in global asset allocation. In 1968, gold represented nearly 5 percent of financial assets. In 1980, the level had fallen below 3 percent. That figure had shrunk to less than 1 percent by 1990 and has remained there since. Eric Sprott wrote that “it is surprising to note how trivial gold ownership is when compared to the size of global financial assets.”

Click here to read full article

Don’t Forget About the Interactive Ways We Help You Explore the World

Some of our most popular pieces this year haven’t been commentaries at all. From slideshows, to interactive maps, to videos, to games and quizzes, we’ve rewarded your curiosity to learn and explore in dozens of ways.

Slideshows

Each year, bigger, taller and more technologically advanced projects dot the skylines, country sides and coast lines of cities across the globe. Cities around the world take turns owning the title for the tallest skyscraper, the longest bridge or the deepest mine. Covering nearly every continent of the world, explore our current list of the grandest of all things infrastructure in the world.

Click here to browse the slideshow

Coal, hydroelectric and oil are increasingly in high demand to meet the world’s growing appetite for power. In fact, global energy consumption grew 5.6 percent in 2010, the highest rate since 1973. In addition, rising emerging markets are changing the landscape of global energy. Tour our list of ten reasons why global energy will never be the same.

Click here to browse the slideshow

Interactive

Where Does the Gold Come From? Gold-producing countries are found on nearly all continents, and represent the gamut of economies from developed super-powers to small, emerging market countries. With gold’s spectacular rise in price and related demand, it’s worth your time to know a little bit about where all the gold comes from.

Click to explore the map

As long as there have been people, there’s been an attraction to gold. From pharaohs to hedge funds, gold has been an important tool of building and protecting wealth. This interactive gold timeline carries you through gold's enduring path as a universal symbol of wealth.

Click to travel through gold’s ancient history

Games/Quizzes

Paper money was first used by the Chinese during the Tang Dynasty in 806 AD–500 years before Europe began printing money in the 17th century. It would be another 100 years before America started circulating a national paper currency. And few Americans were more involved in the national paper money history than Benjamin Franklin, who wrote about, designed and printed paper money prior to the national currency. His face on the $100 bill today is our reminder of his contributions as a printer, scientist, scholar, writer and politician.

Click here to test your knowledge of global currencies

You know it’s shiny, it’s rare and it’s the standard against which all good things are measured. But how much do you really know about gold? Take the 2.0 edition of our interactive quiz to test your knowledge of gold history, geography and politics. We’ve also dug up some obscure trivia just to make it a little bit more challenging.

Click here to test your gold knowledge

Happy Holidays

I’d like to thank all of our content partners that help thousands of additional investors take advantage of our weekly insights. Most importantly, I want to thank you for tuning in each week. Our investment team works diligently each week to illuminate the most important drivers of different markets around the world and we hope the information has helped guide you during this year's tumultuous market.

I’m sure many of you have family members, friends and colleagues who are searching for answers to today’s puzzling markets. Please be sure to share these free weekly alerts with them, or they cansign up here.

In his story on Charles Dickens, Alex Green says the author's "goal was not just to entertain but enlighten." We at U.S. Global couldn't agree more. One of the greatest gifts you can give is the gift of knowledge and it’s free.

Happy Holidays!

All opinions expressed and data provided are subject to change without notice. Some of these opinions may not be appropriate to every investor.

The NYSE Arca Gold BUGS (Basket of Unhedged Gold Stocks) Index (HUI) is a modified equal dollar weighted index of companies involved in gold mining. The S&P 500 Stock Index is a widely recognized capitalization-weighted index of 500 common stock prices in U.S. companies.

Republicans have ridden the candidate carousel over the past few months but eventually one GOP contender will emerge to face President Obama in the much anticipated 2012 Presidential Election. As political experts predict a democratic or republican win, another group of pundits, market experts, will guess on how stocks will perform in 2012.

But you don’t have to rely on guesses; Yale and Jeffrey Hirsch from The Stock Trader’s Almanac have scrutinized the performance of the Dow Jones Industrial Average over 177 years of presidential cycles. Beginning with Andrew Jackson in 1829, election years have averaged a 5.8 percent gain in stocks. In fact, 29 out of those 44 election years have resulted in gains for the Dow.*

The Dow’s long history going back to 1833 paints a clear historical trend: “Wars, recessions, and bear markets tend to start or occur in the first half of the term; prosperous times and bull markets, in the latter half,” The Stock Trader’s Almanac says.

We looked into the performance of the S&P 500 Index since Dwight Eisenhower took over the Oval Office in 1953. We discovered that the S&P 500 has historically remained flat over the first two years of a presidential cycle as new administrations take shape and second-term leaders reshuffle their team and set priorities. Over the next two years, the market turned markedly higher.

As the blue line shows below, the government’s massive stimulus effort to revive a struggling U.S. economy has steered the S&P 500 away from the long-term trend during President Obama’s term. The market sold off as America was introduced to President Obama before reversing course in grand fashion in March 2009. While it’s certainly been a roller coaster ride for investors over the past three years, the S&P rose significantly higher at the same time as the long-term historical trend.

What will happen to the market if the GOP is able to oust the incumbent? Nearly out of stimulus ammo, will we see a similar pattern if President Obama is re-elected?

Tune in to our January 10 webcast with Jeffrey Hirsch to find out. We’ll discuss historical market cycles like these as well as what’s in store for investors this election year.

Make sure to register today. If you can’t make the live presentation, it will be made available for you to watch on demand shortly after the webcast ends.

Register Today

Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

*Based on annual close; prior to 1886, the data is based on Cowles and other indices: 12 mixed stocks, 10 rails, 2 inds 1886-1889; 20 mixed stocks, 18 rails, 2 inds 1890-1896; Railroad average 1897. First industrial average was published 5/26/1896.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is a price-weighted average of 30 blue chip stocks that are generally leaders in their industry. The S&P 500 Index is a widely recognized capitalization-weighted index of 500 common stock prices in U.S. companies.

All opinions expressed and data provided are subject to change without notice. Some of these opinions may not be appropriate to every investor. By clicking the link above, you will be directed to a third-party website. U.S. Global Investors does not endorse all information supplied by this website and is not responsible for its content.

Followers of The Stock Trader’s Almanac are probably familiar with the “January Effect” that shows how small-capitalization companies have historically crushed large-cap stocks during the first month of the year. According to Yale and Jeffrey Hirsch, small-caps have delivered a forceful blow to their larger counterparts in 40 out of 43 years from 1953 through 1995.

But if you dissect the performance of the small-cap Russell 2000 Index versus the large-cap Russell 1000 Index from December 15 through the end of February, you’ll see that for the last 30 years, most of the “January Effect” actually occurred within the last two weeks of the year.

Yale and Jeffrey Hirsch say, “With all the beaten-down small stocks being dumped for tax loss purposes, it generally pays to get a head start on the January Effect in mid-December.” Historically, our investment team has sought small-cap junior mining and natural resources stocks because of their historical ability to add alpha. This time of year—similar to merchants offering discounts to holiday shoppers—may be an opportune time for investors to shop for small-caps.

I’m very excited to have Jeffrey Hirsch as a special guest presenter on our January 10 webcast. We’ll talk about how to use historical cycles to spot opportunities in the marketplace. From gold to grains, cycles can signal when, where and why it may be a time to invest.

Register Today

All opinions expressed and data provided are subject to change without notice. Some of these opinions may not be appropriate to every investor.

The Russell 2000 Index is a U.S. equity index measuring the performance of the 2,000 smallest companies in the Russell 3000. The Russell 1000 Index is a U.S. equity index measuring the performance of the 1,000 largest companies in the Russell 3000 Index. The Russell 3000 Index consists of the 3,000 largest U.S. companies as determined by total market capitalization. Alpha is a measure of performance on a risk-adjusted basis. Alpha takes the volatility (price risk) of a mutual fund and compares its risk-adjusted performance to a benchmark index. The excess return of the fund relative to the return of the benchmark index is a fund’s alpha.