This has been a bad year for hedge funds. Many are facing huge redemptions, while others, such as Ospraie’s flagship commodity fund last week, are simply shutting down. You might think this is all down to the credit crunch or market volatility wiping these funds out, but that’s not always the case. I want to take a look for a moment at the possible motives behind some of these closures. They might not be as simple as they first appear…

“What I’m confident about is that we will get through it,” said Alistair Darling yesterday about the current economic crisis. Well, of course, we’ll get through it. What I want to know is will we get through it with a currency?

For gold and silver investors this has been one of those weeks when you just wanted to bury your head in the sand, weep, then re-emerge in six months time.

Who would be an investor in these markets? Portfolio screens across the globe in virtually every asset class are a grim, grim scarlet. Oh, for some green. Yes, the general markets rallied yesterday, but that was just noise. We all know they’re toast.

It hasn’t been a good week for gold bugs. Gold futures tumbled yesterday (Tuesday) to $21 an ounce as crude oil prices sank to their lowest levels for the last three weeks.

But Money Morning’s Dominic Frisby says he’d rather own physical gold than any other asset right now.

Historical trends show that August almost always marks the start of an annual rally for the yellow metal. And gold’s fundamentals mean it will reward investors that hang on. More from Dominic…

How can a chart tell you if we’re in a bull or a bear market. The secret is understanding moving averages, says Dominic Frisby in British finance magazine MoneyWeek. Dominic says moving averages “are a gloriously simple trading tool that can help clarify where you are in the grand scheme of things.”

I had lunch with a leading hedge fund manager over the weekend. He didn’t want me to mention his name, but he was happy to admit – in fact he went on about it at great length – that he and many of his peers have a serious problem on their hands and there’s not a lot they can do about it.

How the current financial crisis was born in the 1970s. Whether it’s Northern Rock (NHRKF), Fannie Mae (FNM), Freddie Mac (FRE), Indy Mac (IMB), the Labour Government, the State of California, or whoever is going to run into trouble next week, the sirens are blaring, ‘global financial emergency’.

For a few days last week it looked like the ‘junior miners’ had finally decoupled from the mainstream stockmarket trend. They actually rose as the Dow and S&P plunged. Sadly it didn’t last – before long they turned down once again. It seems we were being teased.

AIM is “the most successful growth market in the world” declares the LSE website. “It is now firmly established as the world’s pre-eminent stock market for young, growing companies,” says Head of AIM, Martin Graham.