Chuck Butler (The Daily Reckoning):
What a ride yesterday for the currencies! Gold? Well, at one point gold had shot up $24 on the day! It topped out at $1,142… The shiny metal then gave some back on profit taking, but gold holders have got to love it! Those who keep waiting for a pullback. Well, they might still be waiting when the cows come home.

Another underground investor mowing down the green shoots is Doug Casey of Casey Research. We know Doug well. He owns land in Argentina’s Salta province. And he’s a frequent visitor of Notes HQ. 

For more than a decade, author and academic Dr. Jeremy Siegel had the Midas touch.  His book “Stocks For the Long Run,” first published in October 1996, surveyed more than 200 years of stock market history both in the United States and abroad and made a compelling case that common stocks are the very best long-term investment vehicle. Better than cash. Better than bonds. Better than real estate. Better than gold.

The Fed is flooding the system with as much funny money as it can. US monetary base has shot up by over 100% this year. It’s the largest increase in 50 years by a factor of 10. This build up of freshly printed dollars threatens a dangerous inflation… but not yet.

There has been an incredible amount of interest from Lee Lowell’s put option strategy article from the last two weeks – and his unbroken winning streak in his Instant Money Trader premium service. But we’ve also seen a few questions pop up as well. So today we turn to Contributing Editor, Martin Denholm, to break down Lee’s strategy on selling put options a little more.

The carnage of the past two years in the stock market is giving investors a clear warning; learn a new way of doing things or get ready for more of the same. The money clock never stops ticking and the longer you wait to make the necessary changes to stop the bleeding in your accounts the less you’ll have when you retire. Every day you put this off increases the chance of being broke in retirement.

First-quarter earnings reports for the big banks weren’t bad on the surface. But banks had to pull some rabbits out of the hat to do it. For example, Goldman Sachs skipped December in order to post improved numbers.

Fed confuses markets, risk assets get sold…  SNB intervenes to stop franc’s rise… ECB issues 12-month liquidity… Bernanke to get grilled? And Now… Today’s Pfennig!

Right now, there’s more than $9.5 trillion in cash on the sidelines – or more than twice the amount of money currently invested in stock mutual funds, according to MoneyNet.inc and the U.S. Federal Reserve. Private equity firms alone are believed to hold as much as an additional $1.3 trillion.

Currencies stop the dollar’s run… BRIC meeting could get ugly for the dollar… RBA meeting notes good for Aussie dollars… Depressing data / forecasts for housing… And Now… Today’s Pfennig!