How do they behave across these hiking cycles by the Fed?

you get those typical sort of short-lived jitters around the first hike.

Equity markets in the median case tend to bottom sort of six weeks, maybe two months after that first hike, and then that gets faded.

This time around, that actually coincides with the US midterm election season, which is heating up now.

And around those elections, you get increases in implied vol.

Now, Having said that, the move index hadn't, pardon the pun, moved that much around this first hike that we saw.

We often get the question from clients, or we have recently, if there's a level of yields that quote unquote breaks the equity market.

What's going on there?

And so we do expect gold to benefit from the action of the Treasury.

Sorry to interrupt, Doug, but the other... asset that has been linked with the debasement trade has been crypto markets and Bitcoin in particular.

And we saw Bitcoin really break out of its ranges.

Fortunately, we can't attribute all of that to this rise of these potential debasement trades, because around the same time, we got regulatory action.

When we look at the high frequency data, the move in Bitcoin was several hours after the move that we saw in gold, which was contemporaneous with that announcement of the trade So it's not obvious.

Sometimes Bitcoin has been a beneficiary of these debasement type trades, but sometimes it hasn't.

The Bitcoin debasement trade ended in October rather than February as it was for gold and some of those other assets that you mentioned.

But in the bigger picture, what's the end game here, you think?

I, I don't know if I'm jumping too far ahead for your timeline, but when exactly did the push to remove guns begin?

Okay, I'll get into that now.

So the f- the first, um, terrorist attack I want to talk about in Australia, w- uh, i- its first terrorist attack was 1978, and that was the Hilton Hotel bombing.

Now, at the time, the Australian kind of intelligence agencies, um, they weren't cooperating with state police.

And so there was one state, I think it was South Australia, that had already cut connections with Australia's intelligence agencies and basically going, "What do you guys even do? You don't share anything with us.

We're capable of policing our own citizens and keeping everyone safe," and they cut ties.

And New South Wales, which is the biggest state, was about to do the same.

This, uh, report about the, uh, the marijuana, was that in local news? Was that a, a national story or police reports?

And so when we start with equities, for example, despite the shift in geopolitics, are we still staying risk on in equities, Alex? Or are we trimming? What's the story there?

Yeah, I think as the title suggests, right, we've gone from an era of easy sort of low risk, high conviction trades, the penalty kicks to much more macro risks.

As you said, we've got this geopolitical cross currents also have inflationary concerns with the oil price and AI related concerns in terms of the investments.

So that has changed the outlook somewhat, but we're still staying risk on.

We maintain an overweight equities standpoint.

I'll make a couple of points.

The first one is that these cross currents have led us to tactically reduce some equity risk.

But Alex, what about credit? And how are we thinking about credit in the context of our asset allocation?

Mm.

And some of these topics which, you know, um, I think are very obvious that some, the official narrative is not what actually happened.

And so yeah, that got a couple of million views and it's just, it only takes that one thing to click.

And I think in Australia so many people have...

Not aware that it's, we haven't had that recession in 30 years that other countries had.

It's the she'll-be-right mate attitude.

Most people have never seen a rainy day until, till very recently, 'cause property's always gone up and everyone owned a house.

Yeah

What numbers are you watching?

Yeah, thanks for having me on, Kelly.

As you say, we're really hitting key levels at the moment.

So the two numbers that we're watching, the first one is 82K.

Now, when we look at the flow weighted average price of inflows into spot ETFs, 82K is around the level of the average investor.

So that means potentially investors are showing a loss on their investment now that may lead to redemptions.

Or will people add to their holdings? That's going to be a key question for us.

But all of that aside, do you think the market or gold and silver, other assets are at risk as it continues to struggle?