The USA Gold Trail
When I first started this blog in 2008 I was a silver stacker, and an enthusiastic student of all things related to the history of gold, silver, and money. Somehow I came across the FOFOA blog as well as writings of Michael Kosares, FOFOA, and A/FOA. While I don't remember the details of how I found those sources, I do remember finding a wealth of old word wisdom.
This was a period of my life where I was in my early 20's and studying all things not taught in public school or Universities. The Gold Trail and FOFOA was foundational to my thinking on value, economics, and impacts my judgement 15y later.
What follows are the links to the original sources, and PDFs that form the core material of that journey.
Here is a link to the archived USA Gold Forum, featuring the relevant periods when A/FOA were active on the forum.
Here is a link to a 420 page PDF Compendium of all of their writings put together by Ron Mullis. He has an old little blog called The Matrix Sentry. It reminds me a lot of this website!
Here is a link to FOFOA, where the writings of pseudo-anons A/FOA were further dissected by their contemporary FOFOA. It is a long-form, pseudonymous blog focused on gold, money, and the failure modes of modern fiat currency systems, written primarily between roughly 2008–2014. It is not a news site or investment blog in the conventional sense. It’s a theoretical framework for understanding what happens to money when confidence collapses.
I was fortunate enough to get read FOFOA when he was still publishing free articles to the blog. And before the good stuff went behind the paywall. I've never been a paid subscriber there, so cannot speak to the value of the paid service. However, between the Gold Trail Archives and the FOFOA's public posts, there is an entire body of work that is accessible to the public, to anyone with an interest in exploring monetary history from through an old world perspective.
At its core, FOFOA explores one central idea:
Gold is not an investment, a commodity, or a hedge — it is a final settlement asset that reasserts itself when currency systems fail.
Everything else on the blog flows from that premise.
