Many on FR have been dismissing gold all way up from $275. Gold was frequently discussed on the Market Wrapup threads back in the day. After a while people got sick of the constant bashing and moved over to Freedom4um.
Gold is a terrible investment. Except for when it isn't. The gold bugs have been peddling, gold with the exact same arguments, with the exact same predictions of impending financial doom, since the last time gold was this high, more than a quarter of a century ago.
If you bought gold for $650 an ounce in 1980, congratulations! Gold is now over $800 an ounce. Of course, with inflation, it takes $1,644.64! to equal the purchasing power of $650 in 1980, so your real return on your 27 year investment is a loss of more than 50%.
Are there times when a person can make a killing in gold? Sure. Is investing in gold a highly speculative proposition? By definition. Volatility in the price of gold is what allows it to sometimes go up rapidly enough to generate a large short term profit. That same volatility allows the price to go down rapidly, creating a large short term loss.
Not many, but a loud and foolish few. Unfortunately, they were able to influence JimRob back about 5 years ago, and that's how we lost the clear thinking voice of RobNoel (he hasen't posted since 2002)
The anti-gold squawkers will disappear in the very near future; hopefully never to be heard again.
I bought when gold was 290 and silver was around $5. It wasn’t the very best investment I could have made, but a tripple in 9 years isn’t bad either.
Oh, is that where they went? Well, I have to admit they were dead right about Gold so props for that. However, I remember those threads too, and while they were right on about Gold, they were dead wrong about the Stock Market and Real Estate.
I remember when the Dow was approaching 8000 the gold bugs were cheering (and predicting) as low as 3000, it is 13,500. As for Real Estate, they were predicting a crash 5 even 6 years ago as I recall...of course it is now in the process of correcting but being that far off on timing is disastrous - indeed people who bought back then (including me) are still sitting on a ton of equity even after 10%+ drops.
So, I take the good with the bad...hard to argue against trends so I'm also currently long on metals, long on oil, just waiting for this bubble to pop so I can bet the other way.