This is the first issue of the subscription service Ticker Trax By Thom Calandra. This first one is free for all and inset into this ThomWatch report.

I thank Marcus New and his Stockhouse teams in Toronto, Vancouver and New York for pursuing this thing for nearly five years. Marcus is Stockhouse’s chief executive and a darned good table tennis player. If you would like to see the pre-sales page that the Stockhouse team has prepared for Ticker Trax, please click here. (I sure hope it does not ping-pong to a blank page.)

What follows is a sampling of Ticker Trax, all of it original reporting. We hope to locate a handful of the planet’s finest holdings – period. There will be windows of vast wealth framed by even larger windows of extreme risk. We’ll have interviews and investing ideas. We’ll have dining opportunities.

We shall talk about money, art, food, literature, swimming, friends and family. We will, I hope over the course of a year’s approximately 30 or more issues, have spawned and nurtured a select family of garage-loft investors who can rely upon me and each other for a hand to hold, a property to market, an ear to listen.  

There are just a few ground rules, if you please: 

• It has been many years since my last service, The Calandra Report, put me at center stage. I recognize the shortcomings that led to my U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission settlement during those wonderful but manic weeks and months those many years ago. If I intend to take a position in something we discuss in Ticker Trax, I will state it prominently. Likewise, any sales – and well in advance of any commentary.

• I hope to repeat the success of my original subscription service, and I expect to follow every legal and ethical principle in the investment world. My cosmos (including wife and two children) of holdings also is listed for free on Stockhouse under the “portfolio setting” for user TCALANDRA. I receive no compensation of any type in exchange for commentary.

• We can provide testimonials from former subscribers and others who intend to take this new trek across our planet in search of a handful of excellent securities, properties and strategies, and more that a few fine meals and sights. See ThomWatch for more.

• Please try not to eat the daisies. Ticker Trax is about discovery, be it locating overlooked natural resources, molecular compounds, wealth, thin-crust pizza or technologies. It will not be about trading or about model portfolios or about what some used to call The Calandra Effect, a term that still gives me the heebie-jeebs. Instead, I believe you have to be in it to win it.

• I have not been right as often as I have been wrong in the almost five years since I left the CBS MarketWatch that I co-founded and nurtured from ground nothing to ground everything (and now owned by News Corp.) But my “right choices” – gold, gold coins, genomic tools, agriculture, generic drugs and China Internet networks – have more than made up for my “wrongs.”

• Once again, thank you for the chance to do what I love doing most: sharing ideas with the garage-loft investors who have made my career a beautiful, just a cherished thing. I still get goose bumps when I view the thanks that Bill Murphy, Chris Powell and the team at the Gold Antitrust Action Committee handed to me more than six years ago, in this 2002 note.

Ticker Trax Asks: Adapt or adopt?

You have your early adopters – say, of handheld gizmos and other technologies – and you have your early adapters – people such as market timers or seers, statin users in their early 50s, that fellow I see riding the recumbent bicycle along Richardson Bay each afternoon. 

Frank Veneroso, a somewhat secretive market strategist, probably qualifies as both early adopter and adapter. Frank, when I first met him about five years ago, had largely been keeping his investment ideas to himself and a small group of select and wealthy clients. At the time, Veneroso was operating out of several locations, and I was fortunate in that one of the man’s offices was just up the block from where we were brewing my beloved CBS MarketWatch along the outskirts of San Francisco’s Financial District.

At the time, Frank V. believed strongly that governments were performing a kind of intervention in the flow of the planet’s money – largely by depressing the price of gold. On the WWW, I can still find some of that reporting I did on Veneroso. Click here to see it. 

I am fortunate to catch up briefly with Frank Veneroso, who was absolutely spot-on about the sharp decline in values for commodity prices after hard assets notched a new high this past June. I believe he is based in New Hampshire these days. I asked him about gold coins and the premiums these coins are holding as investors start to seek alternatives to the planet’s currency exchange system, which is erupting on a daily basis.

Veneroso told me Monday (today) he does not follow the “physical gold market” that coins represent. But he feels good about adapting his “wildly bullish” view of gold when he saw the fiscal turmoil coming up the road.

In June, he says, “I was wildly bearish on commodities. I warned that the world would come apart and the commodity bust would take down gold and gold stocks and that a nuclear winter was coming in base metals and the other non-gold metal stocks would enter that nuclear winter. Of course I was too early. Anyone with any real understanding of the fundamentals had to be. And then of course when the bust came it was the worst in history.”

Veneroso continues, “It is not over for the base metals and other commodities. When the manipulations that went on come out, there will be a second leg to the revulsion. The biggest manipulations in history (they are). As for gold, I am wildly bullish. But the hedge funds remain big net longs. That worries me because there is huge fraud in the hedge fund sector. When that comes out, the investors will pull out almost all their money from that sector.”

And more from Frank V.: “But that aside, the U.S. is on a path of quantitative easing that the world has never seen. All economies will super ease. But the U.S. will be the worst. It is amazing to me that this is not issue No. 1 in financial markets. The hedge funds and investment banks have all gone super bullish on the dollar. This is just another hedge fund investment bank craze with a lot of herding and manipulation. They keep talking about a shortage of dollars when the U.S. is the world’s mega debtor and the world’s mega current account deficit economy. They keep talking about the dollar as a safe haven when the locus of economic weakness and financial crisis is here and the Federal Reserve is clearly on a path to debase the dollar because of the debt deflation here.

And finally: “It’s as crazy as the case they made for commodities in the first half, when the world economy was weakening, supply and demand responses were well under way and prices had gone higher in real terms than in any prior cycle in history. This is the last desperate bubble for this failing crowd. And when they are exhausted the dollar will fall very hard and gold will be released to the upside. That is all I know,” Mr. Veneroso says.

This is all we know and all we need to know. I believe that.

By Zee Numbers

Folks, lots of former subscribers and old friends, often pass through town (we live in Tiburon, California, U.S.), and the one question they almost always seem to ask is “So how high will gold go?”

To which I reply that if they read my new novel awaiting publication, PABLO BY NUMBERS, I would be glad to provide them with my research on natural resources and on genomic tools, drug discovery, agriculture and so on. That usually stops the conversation, and we resume our early afternoon buckwheat pancakes breakfast at the New Morning Café by the Tiburon Ferry Landing.

Okay, because the novel is still awaiting hard cover, I tend to give our cherished garage-loft investors my short answer: “I do not look forward to a world in which gold’s price (and similarly silver and platinum) rises 10X, as in $10,000 for a one-ounce Maple Leaf or Koala or Sovereign or Eagle, even a Kroog for heaven’s sake. But were that to happen, and I believe it COULD happen in the next two years, I am prepared.”

My current search is for recently minted gold coins that do not have thick premiums because of the logjam in bullion markets. Personally, I also am perusing some of the research I did many years ago on Central Fund of Canada (AMEX: CEF, Stock Forum), a closed-end fund that trades at a premium to gold and silver prices in the U.S. and Canada and represents gold and silver in repository. I am trying to reach the Spicer family, which runs Central Fund.

A friend who is assisting my knowledge trek for gold coins is Van Simmons at David Hall in Newport Beach, Calif. Van is doing a terrific business these days and specializes in rare coins. As for current mints, Mr. Simmons points to Tulving, a brisk dealer of coins and Johnson Matthey bars that require minimum purchases and cash or wired funds; no credit cards please.

Hannes Tulving, a 53-year-old operator, is also located in Newport Beach, where smoke from the California wild fires Sunday curtailed his regular jog across the sand. His premiums on some one-ounce gold coins is $59 each, which is about half the going rate – Tulving deals with mostly large customers. Hannes, whose folks hailed from Estonia, tells me his business this year is running about $150 million in total dollar volume, or almost four times what he did last year.   

Tulving  -- at www.tulving.com -- has been in business about 15 years and once had a run-in with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission regarding the way he graded coins. That was 20 years ago and is “all taken care of,” he says. Tulving’s turnaround time on purchases (as a broker, he sells and buys) is 48 hours, which is the blink of an eye compared with one-week to three-week waits for many retail suppliers of coins. “We only sell what we have, and have low overhead and low margins,” he tells me. His supply of coins – he likes the 2009 Australia Kangaroo – is down to about 1,200 from 3,000 a few months ago.

So call me insane. They did in 1999 when gold’s price was a lonely $260-something and only eight folks on the entire planet were interested in bullion. So ask me about life sciences sometime, OK?

Century City

I had intended in this first Ticker Trax to discuss the views of a very successful asset manager just outside Los Angeles, in Century City. His name is Gil Morales and his track record with two funds he runs at Gil Morales & Co., along with his investing history at  William O’Neil & Co., is extraordinary – even this miserable year.

Morales, a 49-year-old former cartoonist, also scripts a letter called www.gilmoreport.com. I think Gil was impressed when I quoted that line from O’Neil’s book, HOW TO MAKE MONEY IN STOCKS, “Broad diversification is often a hedge for ignorance.”

Still, Mr. Morales’s view will have to wait for another day later this week in ThomWatch, which is the free counterpart to our Ticker Trax By Thom Calandra service. Until then, please peruse the LANDING PAGE FOR TICKER TRAX. Let me know what you think. And again, thank you.

On The Ticker Trax

There is plenty more color, cosmic tears and even a life lesson or three in the interview editor Darin Diehl conducted with me not long ago. The two-part interview is worth a brief scan … and can be seen by clicking here.

Ticker Trax By Thom Calandra will explore planet Earth for those few stakes that offer the prospect of excellent, in some cases cosmic, returns. It is for those who are entirely at ease with stratospheric levels of risk.

As we complete our investment research, we fully hope and expect, but cannot and do not promise, stratospheric returns. Speculative fervor to some extent is likely to return to equity markets and commodities markets and some specialized strategies.  Witness the surge in Saudi Arabian gold purchases in November – even as the futures price of the metal remains flat.

HOLDINGS: Thom’s cosmos of holdings is listed for free Stockhouse members on www.Stockhouse.com under the “portfolio setting” for user TCALANDRA. He does not own Central Fund of Canada or any other exchange traded fund that represents bullion. 

THOM’S STORY: Thom Calandra helped his audience find value in a quagmire of investment choices. He also settled a valid complaint with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission in 2005. Thom co-founded CBS MarketWatch, MarketWatch.com and FT MarketWatch in Europe. As the voice of Thom Calandra's StockWatch and The Calandra Report, Thom fancied $300-ounce gold before that metal became an investment rage. Thom visited bioscience companies, metals mines and scores of thin-crust pie joints across the planet in a search for profit, fashion and pizze de trippa gorgonzola. Thom's novel PABLO BY NUMBERS was completed in summer 2008.