Knowledge is power. And lack of knowledge is terrifying. This rather banal insight helps our readers by motivating our buys and sells.

Festivities for the 25th anniversary of “Die Wallfall”, the fall of the Berlin Wall between the old Communist East Germany and the rest of the world were rather subdued because the now free German railroad workers went on strike. Strikes were illegal in the old German “Workers' Paradise”.

Commodity prices do not move in lockstep with each other. In the olden days, people used the price of copper to forecast economic growth.

The largest plastic tube producer in Latin America moved to extend its domain again. This time the victim is US Dura-Line, maker of high density polyethylene precision tubes for telecom voice and data, energy transmission, and infrastructure with a blue-chip client base.

These are cheap prices for gold bars, but remember you will have to pay insurance after taking delivery; leaving the gold with Bullion Vault (BV) means cheap insurance.

The US is a piker on penalties for banking wrongs.. UBS had to post bail at euros 1.1 bn ($1.5 bn) before the Swiss bank's trial for aiding money laundering and tax fraud in France.