Buying gold...
- Thread starter Aaron Smith
- Start date
slashvanyoung
Dopefish lives!
It is a good way to stabilize your savings and maybe making a profit mid-termed. But if you're looking for a long term investment, for retirement, than you should also look into alternatives like life insurances etc.
SocialNumb
Damn Christians!
roy22341
Member
If you're well diversified elsewhere, placing some of your savings in gold isn't a terrible idea. However, I'm not so sure putting anything more than about 10% of your savings in it is a good idea. Personally I think there is a "gold bubble" going on right now. Much like we saw with the housing bubble and oil bubble, it is artificially inflated in price and when it comes down its going to do some damage to people who have invested too much in it.
If I were you, and I just did this myself, I'd get into a decent mutual fund. The stock market is slowly recovering and the opportunity is there to make some very good returns if you're invested in a well diversied (or even better - indexed, maybe small cap) mutual fund.
Gold is a short-term, return-chasing investment in which you are essentially betting on the economy collapsing. There is little really difference between what is going on now and what happened with the oil speculation that caused 140$ a barrel oil the summer of last year. Just my opinion though, don't put all your eggs in one basket.
If I were you, and I just did this myself, I'd get into a decent mutual fund. The stock market is slowly recovering and the opportunity is there to make some very good returns if you're invested in a well diversied (or even better - indexed, maybe small cap) mutual fund.
Gold is a short-term, return-chasing investment in which you are essentially betting on the economy collapsing. There is little really difference between what is going on now and what happened with the oil speculation that caused 140$ a barrel oil the summer of last year. Just my opinion though, don't put all your eggs in one basket.
gold is good investment in times on crisis but not to invest in it when there´s a crisis going on but the other way around...as i´m lead to believe some people have made good investments lately becuase they had previously invested in gold before the "global crisis" and when things turn econmically bad people tend to flee to solid "goods" markets like the gold one, so they made like 20 to 30 % profit (+-) in what they invested before, because gold value has risen up.
if i had $$ i´d be looking into that but not now
if i had $$ i´d be looking into that but not now
Gold doesn't have any inherent value. It's a commodity that people place value upon just like any other good. Prices rise and fall, and it isn't immune to the rules of supply and demand, or "bubbles."
Personally, I have no idea whether it's a good idea to invest in gold at the moment or not, but be cautious. Just like with any other investment, putting all your eggs in one basket is a bad idea.
Personally, I have no idea whether it's a good idea to invest in gold at the moment or not, but be cautious. Just like with any other investment, putting all your eggs in one basket is a bad idea.
kaomao
Member
Chryst Krispies
Vanilla Gorilla
This long without a Leprechaun reference???
After you get your pot, you kill whoever tries to fuck with it.
After you get your pot, you kill whoever tries to fuck with it.
Skaldir
formerly known as Unicorn
slashvanyoung
Dopefish lives!
Aaron, you could also think about investing into musical instruments. That may seem to be a bit far stretched, but it is a very secure investment if you know what to buy.
There are some vintage Gibsons, D'Angelicos etc. (hasn't got to be guitars ofc) that - contrary to gold - have constantly risen in value for the last decades.
It requires far more skill and knowledge than investing into gold, but it's also more fun.
There are some vintage Gibsons, D'Angelicos etc. (hasn't got to be guitars ofc) that - contrary to gold - have constantly risen in value for the last decades.
It requires far more skill and knowledge than investing into gold, but it's also more fun.
Zack Uidl
Member
^ i have a D'Angelico like you mentioned. I actually got it on accident hahah....it has risen in price substantially. I don't know when I will sell that guitar, but when I do, it will be a lot more than I paid for sure
This is where my head is at as well. There are tons of investors who seem to think that buying gold is identical to buying stocks, but it is fundamentally different. The bottom line is that one's capital has to be in some form, and as I already stated, the prospects for the US dollar do not look very good right now at all. I mean, I would even feel better putting my savings into euros right now, almost any currency but the dollar, really.
Also, if this whole health care debacle gets implemented, that will put even more pressure the dollar, on top of the ragged economy. The whole stock market rally this year is completely ridiculous, too. Bad news comes out that's just slightly better than anticipated (like, we lose 275,000 jobs instead of 290,000 that month), and somehow the whole market gains 200 points that day...it's bizarre. There is really no genuine economic recovery going on, especially enough to warrant a 60% gain in the Dow Jones this year. It will eventually become clear to investors that the US has not recovered at all, and when they make that realization, the US stock market is going to tank. Gold only loses when the economy seems to be stable and growing, and right now we're heading full steam in the wrong direction.
Anyway, I wish I'd bought gold earlier this year, but the fact that it has gained so much already doesn't bother me, because everything that the government could possibly do to weaken the dollar, they have already done and are continuing to do.
Really interesting article by the way (written about nine months ago).
http://the-gold-market.blogspot.com/2009/02/gold-to-dow-jones-ratio.html
Right now we're at about DOW = 9.2 ounces of gold, so by the article's standard, gold is undervalued...
http://the-gold-market.blogspot.com/2009/02/gold-to-dow-jones-ratio.html
Right now we're at about DOW = 9.2 ounces of gold, so by the article's standard, gold is undervalued...
Try a resource whose value isn't arbitrarily inflated due to an infantile obsession with shiny objects - real estate might do better if you can afford it, since we're running out of room in decent places far faster than we're running out of gold.
Jeff
Jeff
I can't say I agree with anything you just said. First, you have to realize that gold = a true measure of wealth. For as long as humans have existed and have used money to buy things, gold has held value, because everyone agrees that it is valuable (it is rare, and it's supply is very stable/cannot be manipulated upwards). If you want to call it an infantile obsession, then fine, but it has been an infantile obsession that has always existed, and will continue to exist. Sure, gold is less practical than wood or coal or oil or whatever, but I fail to see how you could say that it's value is any more arbitrary than any other physical object. Consider that there are civilizations who vanished from Earth thousands of years ago, who minted their currency in gold, and yet their currency still holds tremendous value when stacked against any modern paper currency. Even if you could remove all the historical value of these old coins (well, you can- you of course could melt them down), my point is that the very gold that they are made of makes them valuable by today's standards. Gold has never been valuable because it's supply is "running out".
Real estate could potentially be better than a paper currency which is being printed and constantly debased (which every government does, but especially the US, especially recently), but it would also depend heavily on where that real estate is located in the world. I don't think that you could make a case that owning land and/or real estate is better than owning gold. Don't get me wrong- depending on the economic and financial conditions in the world, there are times when it is good to own gold, and times when it may be better to own something else (even paper currencies), but in my lifetime, available real estate is not going to be as rare, and thus valuable, as gold is. It will be a very long time until the whole planet is so filled up with real estate, that real estate itself becomes a commodity.
Real estate could potentially be better than a paper currency which is being printed and constantly debased (which every government does, but especially the US, especially recently), but it would also depend heavily on where that real estate is located in the world. I don't think that you could make a case that owning land and/or real estate is better than owning gold. Don't get me wrong- depending on the economic and financial conditions in the world, there are times when it is good to own gold, and times when it may be better to own something else (even paper currencies), but in my lifetime, available real estate is not going to be as rare, and thus valuable, as gold is. It will be a very long time until the whole planet is so filled up with real estate, that real estate itself becomes a commodity.
I think you've missed my point entirely and underestimated my grasp of the subject.
As soon as you can name for me people who got richer by just buying gold and find a reasonably-priced flat in growing cities where the few fortunate enough to have owned land as development started approaching critical mass, I might think otherwise.
Jeff
As soon as you can name for me people who got richer by just buying gold and find a reasonably-priced flat in growing cities where the few fortunate enough to have owned land as development started approaching critical mass, I might think otherwise.
Jeff
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