It was 1974, and I was a young teenager, when I had a defining experience that I remember to this day.

I grew up in a little medieval town in France, and my parents were very involved in our community of about fifteen thousand people. When a small group of Cambodian refugees arrived in France, my parents immediately agreed to “adopt” a family named Huu.  

Adopting refugees meant helping them with their basic needs: find accommodation they could afford, a first job, clothes, and all the other necessities to survive.

We also welcomed the Huus into our home on a regular basis. It happened so many times that the kids from both families became like stepbrothers and sisters.

To me, the story of this refugee family who became our good friends has always been an example of human courage and determination.

We’ve witnessed what I consider to be a turning point for the stock market.

Just when many predicted another growth year for the markets, on Monday, February 5, the Dow plunged by 1,600 points—its greatest point drop in history.

Jared Dillian is a former Wall Street trader and the editor of Mauldin Economics’ investment advisories Street Freak and The Daily Dirtnap, a newsletter for sophisticated investors that is published about 225 days per year.

Like us here at the Hard Assets Alliance, Jared believes cryptocurrencies could one day be successful, but is skeptical about the raging bitcoin bull stampeding through today’s investment landscape.

Here’s a snippet from The Daily Dirtnap issue of Jan. 4, 2018, that we thought you may find entertaining and enlightening. Enjoy!

The beginning of the year is a good time to take a step back, reflect on both our personal and professional lives, and maybe re-evaluate some decisions we made in the past year.

All too often, influential forces like the mass media and social networks—which are driven by sensationalism and glamor—distract us from what is important. That’s especially true in the investment world.

For this reason, I’d like to share with you a recent podcast from Peak Prosperity in which my business partner Ed D’Agostino breaks down the key principles of investing in precious metals and their role in every investor’s portfolio.

The cryptocurrency craze continues.

Having seen the astounding rise in Bitcoin’s value, those who remained on the sidelines are now kicking themselves for not buying it when it was first released. Surely, they’d be millionaires by now.

But is the meteoric rise of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies really an indication of true value?

It seems that more and more people justify investing in cryptocurrencies—even at current record prices—by claiming that they’re an effective hedge against the instability of fiat currencies.

But is it true?

Sure, a fiat money system where central banks can and do literally print money at will has its weaknesses. That’s why hard assets like gold are so popular among smart investors: as real stores of value, they provide a safety net against currency depreciation.

However, it’s doubtful that the same applies to cryptocurrencies. Despite what the crypto-evangelists will tell you, digital tokens will never and can never replace gold as your financial hedge.

Here are six reasons why.

Last week, MarketWatch ran an article written by InvestorPlace editor Jeff Reeves and titled, “Seven Reasons to Sell Gold Now.”

It offered the usual cookie-cutter reasons that gold supposedly is not a good investment right now: lack of inflation, tighter monetary policy in the US, and a “risk-on” market environment, just to mention a few.

All in all, I think the article missed the mark, so here’s a rebuttal for each argument.

Question: How do you recognize a bubble that’s ready to burst?

The answer is twofold:

a. When people start going crazy over a certain asset—even the ones who couldn’t have cared less a year earlier.

b. When people start doing insane things with that particular asset.

For example, in 2006, I read that some homeowners were taking out home equity loans to purchase Super Bowl tickets.

Using your house as an ATM was just fine, because everybody knew that home prices would always go up. It was almost a natural law, like the sun rising in the East.

When I read the Super Bowl story, I remember thinking: This is going to crash.

That people were willing to risk the roof over their head to buy tickets for a football game (yes, even that football game) seemed to be the epitome of irrational exuberance.

This week, I had a similar A-ha moment when I first heard about Jesus Coin.

Poor, spoiled, disadvantaged Millennials.

The myth of the underdog youngster has been going around in the media for years.

He’s the poor schmuck who at age 32 still hunkers down in Mom and Dad’s basement because his post-graduate education only fetches him a position as PhD burger flipper at the Scottish restaurant chain which shall not be named.

Marriage and homeownership? Not for this guy. According to the myth, he’ll be lucky if he can dig himself out from under his student loan debt one day and afford an apartment that isn’t populated with stoner roommates and cockroaches.

However, when you take a closer look at the Legg-Mason 2017 Global Investment Survey, an in-depth annual study of investing styles, it paints quite a different picture.

Grant Williams believes that the 76 million retiring Baby Boomers will trigger a major pension crisis. He should know, because he’s been studying financial history and telltale crisis patterns for nearly two decades.

“With that potentially bad situation we could face,” the seasoned asset manager and co-founder of Real Vision TV said in a recent Metal Masters interview, “holding physical metal, somewhere safe, somewhere outside the banking system, is just a sensible precaution to take.”

His outlook has changed drastically since he started his first job trading Japanese markets in 1986: “What I walked into at that time was one of the greatest bull market bubbles the world had ever seen, in the Japanese equity market and real estate market.”

During this heyday, precious metals weren’t on his radar at all—until a year later, when he witnessed his first stock market crash and started asking some inconvenient questions.

Take it from “Dr. Doom”: own some physical gold and keep it out of the banking system.

Dr. Marc Faber, a legendary investor and the editor/publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, is well known for his contrarian investing style.

In a recent Metal Masters interview with the Hard Assets Alliance, he noted that the biggest geopolitical risk for Americans today is not a conventional war but rather cyber-attacks that could take down the US power grid.

In such a scenario, gold would become an irreplaceable medium of exchange. But it’s not the only reason to own gold today.