Despite the recent weakness, the price of gold is still up 9% year to date and may be poised for a strong second half of 2017. This is not unusual: the yellow metal also had a strong start in 2016, only to give back some gains but ended the year in an uptrend, setting up a rally as the calendar moved to 2017.

So is there a seasonal pattern to the gold price? To answer that question, we dissected gold’s performance dating back to 1975 and identified some trends investors can use to their advantage.

Gold got crushed in the post-election rally, but a little over five months into 2017, the yellow metal is up 10.5%—making it one of the best-performing assets of the year so far.

While the outlook for the US economy is more positive than it was 12 months ago, if we zoom out for a moment, the big picture “ain’t so rosy.”

Gold has historically done well in times of uncertainty and panic… and with these seven worrisome signs, there could be plenty ahead.

There’s little doubt that from the moment Kim Jong-un took power in 2011, he has been on a mission to accelerate North Korea’s nuclear program.

There’s also little doubt this is of extreme concern to the US and the Trump administration.

Daily reports of US warships and submarines moving in along the Korean Peninsula and unrelenting missile tests in North Korea have sparked worries that a strike may be imminent. Will we end up in a war with North Korea, and what would be the consequences?

Some experts think it will be the trigger for the next financial collapse. Others call it a “national crisis” of unprecedented proportions.

But what all of them agree on is that there’s no way US pension funds can keep their promises to the next wave of retirees.

Right now, millions of Americans are hard at work believing their pensions will be their saving grace for retirement. But the predicament pension funds across the United States find themselves in does not just spell trouble for the distant future.

The crisis is happening as we speak.

On Monday, George Friedman, global-intelligence expert and chairman of Geopolitical Futures, dropped a bombshell: “I’m usually the guy to tell you about the next decade, but today I’m going to tell you about the next week. It has become apparent that the US is preparing to attack North Korea.”

Friedman—who in his long career has advised the US government and military as well as Fortune 500 companies—held the keynote speech at the annual Strategic Investment Conference hosted by investment research firm Mauldin Economics.

In the speech, he asserted that the US is very close to launching a strike on the rogue Asian nation, whose leadership has escalated its grandstanding in recent weeks.

It all started pretty harmlessly: in December 2016, after about 12 months of deliberations, the Accounting and Auditing Organisation for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAOIFI) and the World Gold Council announced a new “Shari’ah Standard on Gold.”

The new standard was celebrated as a potentially big boost for global gold demand as it would give more than 2 billion Muslims in the world access to gold-based financial products that were previously forbidden to them.

That included vaulted gold, gold accumulation plans, gold certificates, gold-backed ETFs like GLD, and gold mining stocks.

On May 7, Marine Le Pen's defeat in France's presidential election secured an integrated EU and had many investors breathing a sigh of relief.

Had the election gone her way, French workers could have seen the devaluation of their euro-denominated pensions if Le Pen had made good on plans to quit the currency in favor of returning to the franc.

Monetary sovereignty sounds all well and good until it claims a huge chunk of your life savings.

Precious metals aren’t just used as investments and for jewelry—some of them have a wide range of industrial applications as well.

Silver, for example, is used (and used up) in a multitude of products, from solar panels to glass coatings, LED chips, semiconductors, touch screens, water purification, and more.

Silver’s big brother gold, on the other hand, has far fewer industrial uses. However, that could change very soon.

In a 1998 speech at Harvard, legendary investor Warren Buffett shared his thoughts on gold:

“[Gold] gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again, and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility.”

Buffett is correct—gold doesn’t produce earnings or pay dividends. There are, however, some good reasons gold should be an essential part of every investor’s portfolio.

In the wee hours of March 27, plucky thieves stole one of the world’s largest gold coins, a 221-pound colossus named the “Big Maple Leaf” from the Bode Museum in Berlin, Germany.

The coin, which takes two to three strong men to carry, had a face value of $1 million, but at current market prices is worth around $4.5 million.

Despite its weight, which is about the same as a refrigerator or an average-size male red kangaroo, the thieves had no problems carrying the coin through the museum and up at least one flight of stairs to hoist it out of a back window.