chosen five that could provide you with some nice
returns over the next year. By investing equal dollar
amounts in each of the following high-dividend pay-
ers, you are safely diversified. This limits your over-
all risk should the market lose its mind.        Look to buy into the following positions today:
       Please note that these are all speculative buys.
We will look to take profits in 2004. If you should
decide to buy in, plan to hold for the long haul.
Happy Profiting! n 5 www.taipanonline.com JANUARY 2004         I’m a pretty modern guy. I’ve
got a cell phone and a high-
speed cable hookup for my com-
puter at home. There’s a DVD
player in the living room and I
got my Mom to buy Sonic
Solutions (SNIC:NASDAQ) at
US$6.75. My wife and I  even
have a “fiber-optic Santa”   as
part of our holiday decorations.                                                             So why, why on Earth am I
about to reverse  15 years  of investment
progress  and recommend a gold stock? I guess it’s
because I’ve come to believe gold is very likely to
continue its advance over the next 6 to 12 months.
And that the current weakness around the holidays
may be one of the last good buy opportunities.         Now, before any gold bugs start to think they’ve
won me over to the shiny side, let me just say that it
was the Fed that got me thinking about gold. Allow
me to explain. Golden calf I’ve always been a gold skeptic. It seems to me that the value assigned to a lump of shiny ore is
every bit as arbitrary as the value assigned to a
piece of paper bearing the hollow stare of a dead
US president. But now that gold is over US$400 an
ounce, the US economy is picking up, and Alan
Greenspan has flat refused to adjust his inflationary
monetary policy, I feel I have little choice but to
become a gold bull.         Over the last few months, I’ve written  at
length  about the Federal Reserve’s overnight repur-
chase activity and the subsequent expansion of the
money supply. I’m not going to bore you with the details again, so let me just say that a loosening of
monetary policy is appropriate to help kick-start a
recovery. But over the long term the current policy
could be disastrous. Diver down         All you have to do is look at the state of the US
dollar to see what may lie ahead. Despite CNBC’s
best attempts to gloss it over, it’s no secret that the
dollar has been getting hammered over the last few
months. And, for all the jawboning by Treasury
Secretary Snow, the current administration is clearly
in favor of a weak dollar.         My best guess is that the administration is con-
tent to flirt with inflation in order to provide a boost
to US exporters. Unfortunately, inflation is a force of
economic nature. And it’s not usually a good idea to
mess with forces of nature. Just ask the scientists in
Jurassic Park. Everything’s running smoothly—   then
just one little variable goes wrong and the next thing
you know Jeff Goldblum is getting his head bitten off
by a velociraptor. In the world of finance, that’s more
or less what happened to Long-Term Capital
Management. Remember them? Inevitable inflation At some point, the Fed is going to have to admit that inflationary pressures exist and raise interest
rates. It’s inevitable. The 10-year bond yield has
seen its lows. And that makes a short position on
the iShares Lehman 20+ Treasury Bond Fund
(TLT:AMEX) a no-brainer.         Just make sure you time your entry well and
have enough margin to weather a rally based on a
dollar rebound. Remember, I cover TLT regularly in The “barbarous relic” gets a spit-shine: Why a little gold in your portfolio is a no-brainer Briton L. Ryle next, page… Altria Group (MO:NYSE)   5.85%   AT&T (T:NYSE) 5.11%   General Motors (GM) 4.71%   DuPont (DD:NYSE) 3.47%   Merck (MRK:NYSE) 3.34%   Company / Symbol           Dividend as of 10/31/03