Guest Post: The New Regime For Precious Metals

Via The World Complex blog, Today we look at long term charts of some key commodities and investigate means by which we might gain insight into the dynamics of their price movements. The methods are from a tool-set I have used for studying climate, much of which has been presented previously. The key problem is interpreting the dynamics of a complex system from empirical observations. These observations are in the form of measurements of some parameter, like temperature, salinity (in ocean climate studies), or price. For our purposes we will consider month-end prices of gold, silver, copper, and rough rice (CBOT contract) from January 1996 to December 2012. The copper chart appears below.  The charts are most commonly studied as a plot of price vs time. There are many articles written on the statistical methods used. Is it a cup with handle? What about that wedge at the end there?...