The first round of the French presidential election takes place this Sunday, April 23… and the future of the European Union depends on the outcome.

Establishment candidate Emanuel Macron leads in the polls, but Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right Front National is trailing him by only 1%. However, the real story of the past month has been the rise of far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

In the latest polls, Mélenchon sits only 4% behind the leader—and if we learned anything from Brexit and the US election, it’s that polls can be “slightly off.”

France has a two-round election process, where the two candidates who receive the most votes make it to a final showdown. It’s quite possible Le Pen and Mélenchon, both of whom are running on an anti-EU platform, could lock up the two spots.

Why should you care about French politics? Here’s why…

Since we just finished tax season, many first-time gold investors might wonder what to do about their precious metals holdings. How are they taxed, and are there any legal ways to lessen those taxes?

Precious metals like gold, silver, and platinum are considered capital assets, so you will have to pay capital gains taxes when you sell them for a profit.

For almost any asset class, the amount of time you hold them plays an important role in how much you pay in taxes.

Short-term capital gains are taxed differently than long-term capital gains—in fact, the difference can be quite substantial.

With much of the price action in gold driven by sentiment and technical analysis, you should keep an eye on the broader trends, even if you consider yourself a buy-and-hold investor.

Traders use technical analysis to predict future market moves based on recent price action. Most of it sounds complicated, but it really boils down to simple math.

One of the most commonly cited technical indicators is a moving average. Day traders often use moving averages based on very short time frames—sometimes as short as one minute—while longer-term investors refer to 50-day and 200-day moving averages to spot opportunities.

Gold had a satisfying first quarter, rising 9% since the beginning of the year. While that can be considered a good start, five events sprinkled throughout 2017 could send it much higher.

On November 8, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi took to the airwaves to declare that Rs500 and Rs1,000 banknotes—which made up 86% of the currency in circulation—would be invalid effective from midnight. While the policy created chaos at banks, the real story lies elsewhere.

When rumors of a ban on gold spread two weeks later, Indians began rioting. To quell the panic, the Finance Ministry was forced to release a statement saying there was “no plan to restrict gold holdings.”

So, Indians took demonetization lying down, but rioted on the rumor of a gold ban. The people of India have a deep-rooted affinity for gold. As such, they understand it is a store of wealth and intrinsically valuable. Rupees? They are just paper.

Gold is known as an inflation hedge; however, its role as a crisis hedge is even more important. Gold is antifragile, to use the term coined by risk analyst and bestselling author Nassim Taleb. When currencies collapse and economies falter, gold can ensure your survival—financially and literally.

Praised be the 17^th-century Italian wisecrack who noted that you shouldn’t “keep all your eggs in one basket.” It’s still true today and just as applicable to life as to investing.

If you live and work in the US, bank in the US, invest with a US brokerage, and hold your savings in US dollars—your eggs could use some diversification.

A prudent investor would never put all his money into just one company—no matter how healthy the firm’s balance sheet. So why would anyone put it all in one country, then? If you have all your assets in one place, you are taking a great deal of risk.

Since the election, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is up over 13% while the S&P 500 is up 11%. One victim of the move into risk assets was gold, which plunged over 13% in the weeks following the election.

Although gold prices have since recovered some of their losses, the yellow metal’s drop has created a buying opportunity for those wanting to add bullion to their portfolios.

For centuries, physical gold has served as an effective crisis hedge. When economies take a severe downturn and paper money gets devalued, a stash of gold can save you from losing your shirt.

Our friendly neighbors to the north would do well to remember that wisdom—because they’ve been experiencing the mother of all housing bubbles.

“At this point,” says Jared Dillian, a former Wall Street trader and contrarian analyst who predicted Canada's looming economic crash early on, “you’d have to live under a rock to not realize what’s going on. Three years ago, I got laughed at when I said Canadian real estate was in a bubble. No one’s been laughing recently, though.”

Unlike three years ago, today the tell-tale signs of a bubble waiting for a pin are ubiquitous. Here are just a few:

At its March meeting, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates by 0.25%. In doing so, it hiked rates for only the third time since 2006. However, in a strange turn of events, the Fed’s move was perceived as a dovish one by the markets.

That’s because even with inflation at its highest level since 2012, the Fed said monetary policy will remain accommodative “for some time.” As has been the case in the past, the Fed is willing to let inflation consolidate above its 2% target before embarking on a more aggressive tightening path.

This willingness to let inflation “run hot” means even as nominal rates rise, real rates—that is, the nominal interest rate minus inflation—are headed into negative territory.

So what are the implications of negative real rates?

The way Robert Kiyosaki, educational entrepreneur of “Rich Dad” fame and member of the Hard Assets Alliance, started accumulating his wealth seems more than just a bit quirky.

According to Kiyosaki, at the beginning of his career, he once interviewed a Hindu guru who was covered in gold jewelry.

Kiyosaki asked him, “Why all the gold?”