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Welcome aboard!

At The Daily Reckoning, we’ve been providing independent financial forecasting and commentary since 1999 — longer than anyone else in the business, I’m proud to say.

Each day we take a fresh look at the world and the markets. We make an informed guess about where they’re headed, and alert you to ways we think you can protect yourself ahead of events. Our sole purpose is to help you profit from the deeper trends the mainstream press has overlooked — or won’t tell you about.

Our chosen metier is forecasting booms, busts and bad endings on your behalf. We’ll pat you on the back when you do well by them… and yes, we’ll also fess up when we make hash of it. It’s your money, after all.

And we like to do it all with a certain flair. We can be irreverent, ironic, even a bit naughty on occasion. If we can bring a slight grin to your face while giving you that critical insights you won’t find anywhere else, we consider it a good day’s work.

Nothing, or no one, is sacred. We won’t hesitate to point a mocking finger at the frauds, scalawags and numbskulls of the world, no matter how rich or powerful.

For over a decade and a half, we’ve worked hard to make these reckonings the most entertaining and informative 15-minute read possible — and still do.

We’ll be writing you six days a week, hopefully with one big idea each day. One idea to help you understand, and profit from (or at the very least, laugh at) the crazy worlds of finance, economics and politics. And we’ll show you how they all tuck together.

That big idea could be about anything from the latest advances in regenerative medicine, to what the Fed’s up to next, to the direction of gold prices or the future of energy — you’ll find it all right here.

We know the world of money isn’t just bankers, balance sheets and stock markets. Or energy and technology. It’s all these pieces together that make up the larger story.

To help us put it all together, we have the distinct pleasure of working with the leading minds in publishing, economics, finance, banking, natural resources, science, and even… (gasp!) government.

Our goal at The Daily Reckoning is to help you connect the dots between your bank account, the markets, and decisions made in Washington and elsewhere around the world.

To do so, we’ll write you each and every afternoon at approximately 6:00 p.m. ET. And we hope you’ll write us back with your feedback. It’s a two-way street around here, and we like to know what you’re thinking.

Be in your seat tomorrow at that time when we sent you your next episode.

It All Seemed So Simple in 1999…

Years ago, The Daily Reckoning was the first of its kind — a free financial e-letter bucking the analysis and advice of the mainstream financial press. We called it first and called it right when we said the U.S. was headed for a major financial crash.

Fast-forward to present day, and a lot has changed. There’s a whole cottage industry producing financial forecasts, gloom about the end of America, predictions of financial collapse and the demise of the dollar. Simply put, there are more opinions, analysis and information for you to turn to than ever before.

But 99.9% of that information leaves you knowing less about how to safely build your wealth, rather than more.

Today, the average American has access to such an abundance of useless facts and senseless data that everyone knows everything and almost no one knows anything.

Think about the knowledge you glean from a cable news network like CNBC or CNN.

By the time you hear the day’s investment ideas on CNBC’s Mad Money, those plays are too expensive. The real money has already been made. That’s because just about everyone has access to mainstream ideas.

It’s only the ideas outside the mainstream — the ones that aren’t widely known — that can deliver you the biggest returns. That’s where we come in.

Since 2008, our forecasts have been featured by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, Fox Business and many other outlets. We like to think with good reason, too.

We accurately predicted that oil prices were headed to all-time highs when crude was just $55 per barrel.

We beat the mainstream by four years, forecasting the ascent of biotechnology as well as personalized and regenerative medicine. We even called the advent of 3-D printing when you could still fit the whole “maker movement” in your living room.

Among the cast of characters whose insights will hit your inbox each day are a Harvard-trained geologist, a self-made billionaire, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist, a former White House Budget Director under President Reagan, an ex-banker to the presidents and the CIA’s currency war analyst.

There’s no shortage of ominous economic indicators, hilarious public policy snafus and Wall Street chicanery to alert you and our 250,000 other readers to. So we continue to do so — in the form of market-leading newsletters, international best-selling books and critically acclaimed feature documentaries, like I.O.U.S.A.

Like any prognosticators, we get it wrong sometimes. But that just proves we’re human. (Although our forecast track record is pretty impressive.)

We don’t have a crystal ball — and we wouldn’t want one. (Where would be the fun in that?)

We can’t tell you the exact moment of the next stock market crash, pinpoint the weekday that the Federal Reserve will finally be defrocked of its exorbitant privilege, or reveal when the dollar will cease being the world’s reserve currency.

What we can do is take a different approach than what you’ll find within the pages of The Wall Street Journal. We go deeper than simply reporting the events of the day. We bring it back to you.

“Part of the world of money,” Agora founder and former Daily Reckoning editor Bill Bonner told us recently, “is not directly related to money; it’s about people.”

“How people live, how they think, what they think about.”

“And it’s all those things that give meaning to money.”