If you have been living in a cave for the last 75 years and missed the work of management guru, Peter F. Drucker, here is your chance to catch up.

I finished reading The Essential Drucker, a weighty tome of 368 pages which summarized the high points and pearls of wisdom of the author's 38 books published since 1939.

A self-described?social ecologist?, Drucker was a journalist who moved to Germany because job prospects in his native Austria-Hungary were so poor following its defeat in WWI.

He became a close friend of Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, who popularized the term ?creative destruction?, and attended lectures by John Maynard Keynes. He fled to the US in 1934 after his writings were burned by the Nazis.

For most of human history, armies were the predominant management model, and most corporations today show the military influence.

Management only emerged as a science during the 1920s, and Drucker was one of the founding fathers. Early adopters, like Coca Cola, Du Pont, IBM, and General Electric, went on to prosper mightily.

He observed that Franklin Delano Roosevelt set up the most productive administration in history. Taking even a single step was so painful for him that he, and all those who worked around him, had to organize the government with the maximum efficiency possible.

This was a key element in America's victory in WWII.

Drucker writes at length on the risks and opportunities of entrepreneurship, and argues that all companies must innovate or die, no matter how pedestrian their product.

He predicted many of the trends that came to dominate the late 20^th and early 21^st century, such as privatization, decentralization, globalization, and the rise of the knowledge worker.

He had a huge following when I was in Japan during the seventies, and his mark can be seen in today's global presence of the major Japanese keiretsu.

While most define a company in terms of producing products and making a profit, Drucker sees it's mission as?creating a customer?. He presents a rigorous process for decision making.

He lauds nonprofits as the best-run organizations in the country because they have to be. Groups like the Girl Scouts, the Red Cross, and United Way maintain an effective global presence without paying their people any money.

He makes the distinction between efficiency and effectiveness, doing things right, versus doing the right things.

Anyone who manages a business, from a Fortune 500 company to a single individual banging away on a PC at home, will benefit from reading this book.

It forces you to take a look at your own operation with fresh eyes. It even advises on how to manage one's own time, from dispensing with unnecessary meetings to minimizing paperwork and bureaucracy.

Drucker moved to California during the seventies, where he set up one of the early MBA programs for Claremont College.

He died in 2005 at the age of 96. To order this insightful book from Amazon, please click here.

I could see this one coming a mile off.

Expectations of a substantial outcome from the Algiers OPEC meeting were zero. Traders loaded up on the short side.

So when word leaked out about a production cap to take place in November, futures went screaming, adding $3, or 6.75% to the price of Texas tea in hours.

OPEC wide production will be limited to 32.5 million barrels a day. Final numbers will be fixed at a November 22nd OPEC meeting in Vienna. Currently, OPEC is producing 33 million barrels a day.

Big oil did as well, with Exxon Mobil (XOM) rocketing 4.67%.

If there was ever a ?buy the rumor, sell the news? event, this is it.

I have monitored OPEC since a decade after it was it was created in Bagdad in 1960, and have traveled in the Middle East for 49 years.

I covered the neighborhood wars for The Economist magazine during the 1970s.

When representing Morgan Stanley in the firm?s dealings with the Saudi royal family in the 1980s, I paused to stick my finger in the crack in the Riyadh city gate left by a spear thrown by King Abdul Aziz al Saud when he captured the city in the 1920s, creating modern Saudi Arabia.

The only mistake I made in my Texas fracking investments is that I sold out too soon in 2005, when natural gas traded from $2 a BTU to $5, and missed the spike to $17.

So let me tell you about the price of oil.

There has never been an OPEC agreement made in person that has stuck. No matter what they promise, they cheat before the ink is dry on any deal.

Saudi Arabia, which has the final say on the price of oil, went into the meeting with production at an all time high of over 11 million barrels a day.

Over the past year alone they have boosted production by an amazing 400,000 barrels a day.

So it will be more than interesting to find out what they do from here.

It is a matter of national survival for the Sunni Kingdom to keep its Shiite enemy across the Persian Gulf, Iran, as economically weak as possible. That means keeping oil prices lower for longer.

It will also be fascinating to see how fast American fracking production will come back on stream.

The Baker Hughes Rig Count has risen for 12 of the past 13 weeks, and there are another 1,000 wells already drilled, but not brought on line.

So what I?m getting to here is that an excellent short selling opportunity its setting up for oil (USO), the Energy Select Sector SPDR Fund (XLE), and individual energy stocks like (XOM).

Just don?t shoot your wad too soon.

Camels Will Fly When OPEC Keeps a Promise

The good news is that you don?t have to be crazy, paranoid, or delusional to own gold (GLD).

However, the ?hundreds of individual investors I know who absolutely love the barbarous relic may not know exactly why.

They originally filled safe deposit boxes with old jewelry, American Eagles, and bullion bars as a hedge against the return of the double-digit INFLATION we endured during the 1970s.

Then gold became a DEFLATION hedge, as yielding nothing outperforms the negative interest rates offered by paper currencies, still -0.35% for the Euro and the Swiss Franc.

They are joined by what I call the tin hat, black helicopter, conspiracy theorists who eternally believe in the collapse of the US dollar and a default of US Treasury debt.

After all, it's always handy to have a few krugerrands in your pocket to bribe the border guards and escape the country (I never understood to where).

Recently, a new crowd of gold buyers has emerged.

Investors are soaking up the yellow metal as a hedge against a Trump presidential win. He has promised a crash of both the debt and equity markets.

Gold should soar.

However, few are aware of the true fundamental reasons for the long-term appreciation of the barbarous relic.

That would be the unrelenting accumulation of gold as a reserve asset by emerging market central banks, especially China.

The Middle Kingdom has long kept any information regarding its gold holdings a state secret.

Individual gold ownership was punishable by death, originally by firing squad, and more recently through organ harvesting.

That changed in June, 2015 when Beijing reported that it owned 1,658 metric tonnes. That is 56.7% higher than the last figure reported in 2009.

Since then, it has added another 165 metric tonnes. Its total holdings are now 1,823 metric tonnes worth $78.6 billion. This compares to the 8,134 metric tonnes, or $350 billion worth of gold owned by the US Treasury.

From these numbers, it is safe to assume that China will continue to add at least another 120 tonnes of gold to its reserve annually for at least another decade.

This should exert upward pressure on prices until we see a serious spike upward in global interest rates.

With ten year Treasury bonds (TLT) yielding 1.61% today, don?t hold your breath for that happening any time soon.

In addition, all of China?s domestic gold production is thought to go into a secret internal account not included in the nation?s central bank reserves.

Apparently, organ harvesting still applies to any release of statistics about THIS gold.

China?s gold buying is only part of an effort to recycle its massive trade surpluses back into the world economy, which last year ran a staggering $593 billion. Of this, $365.6 billion was with the United States.

Run a chart of China?s merchandise trade surpluses against the price of gold and you get an almost perfect match.

China isn?t loading up on gold because of any value or inflationary considerations. It is desperately attempting to diversify away from the US dollar, on which it has become overly reliant due to the massive size of its reserves.

As of July, China?s foreign exchange reserves totaled $3.23 trillion (see table below). America?s only ran to $120 billion, putting it only 14^th in the world after the United Kingdom.

China owns $1.4 trillion worth of US Treasury bonds, notes, and bills, making it the largest holder after the Federal Reserve (which still owns $3.4 trillion left over from its quantitative easing programs).

In addition China owns trillions more in dollar cash, banks deposits, and other cash equivalents.

As long as the world remains a gigantic love fest, this is all fine. But what happens if Trump captures the White House?

China isn?t the only country engaging in a gold strategy.

When Iran was subject to trade sanctions and was banned from dollar clearing, it transacted a significant port of its business through gold barter transactions. Russia has lately been very active in the gold market for the same reason.

Other countries running big trade surpluses, like Germany, Russia, South Korea, the Netherlands, Taiwan, and Singapore, are doing the same.

And here is the number that will blow your mind.

For China to raise its gold holdings to the 17.4% of total reserves typical for developed countries, it needs to buy an incredible 10,101 metric tonnes worth $471 billion.

Add in gold purchases by other high surplus nations, and the total amount of net buying to come is truly mind boggling.

It all sounds like a prolonged bull market in gold to me, especially if interest rates stay lower for longer as I expect. This explains why the gold miners (GDX) had such a hyperbolic move early in 2016.

So you really don?t have to be crazy to own gold.

Well ?. maybe it helps a little bit.

China Trade Surplus 2004-2015

China Foreign Exchange Reserves