Gold has most certainly been in an impressive uptrend for the last 15 years. However, during 2012, gold has been absent the physical demand driver and, even though its price has risen modestly, the trend has not been as linear as in prior years.

It’s been an eventful few weeks since we last spoke. Not only have we survived acid indigestion, the Downton Abbey Christmas special and the end of the world – but the US has avoided falling off the dreaded fiscal cliff, for now.

In this feature we resume our special piece on the major shakeouts in the last 100 years including Friday the 13th mini-crash of 1989, the October 27 1997 mini-crash, the 9/11 aftermath crash of 2001, the 2008 Great Financial Crisis crash, and finally the curious phenomenon of the 2010 flash crash.

George Osborne was forced to share some harsh truths with us all when he presented his Autumn Statement last week: growth in Britain will be weaker than previously expected over the next five years, borrowing higher and austerity longer.

In a special two part piece that will conclude next month we look back at the major stock market crashes of the past 100 years including the great Wall Street Crash of 1929 and Black Monday of 1987.

Markets reacted strongly to Barack Obama’s re-election with investors fearful that a split Congress will crash the US straight into a “fiscal cliff” of automatic tax rises and spending cuts. Traders I know say the markets are likely to fall heavily over the next few weeks…

Oil, crude, brent, light sweet, black gold – whatever you want to call it, one thing’s for certain, it is perhaps the most important of all commodities. After the end of World War II, the price of oil was heavily regulated through both production and price controls in order to keep the commodity relatively stable as its importance in the economy was rising.

The election on November 6 is just a fortnight away now and either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney will be handed the task of kick-starting the world’s largest economy.

This month I’d like to talk about averaging up. Okay with you? No? Well, tough, go and read about shorting instead and see if I care!

China has expressed its own concerns about the eurozone’s fixation with austerity at the expense of growth. Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond apparently it happens to be a good time to be a construction worker in Brazil at the moment with the football world cup less than two years away and the 2016 Olympic Games and $500bn worth of infrastructure projects also in the pipeline.