On 2010-01-02, Gunner Asch wrote:
On Sat, 02 Jan 2010 11:28:28 -0600, F. George McDuffee
wrote:

FYI --

For some hard data on the actual return on investment see
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...y9JhxPH0&pos=2
snip
Investors who put $10,000 in stocks on Dec. 31, 1999, have $9,090
now, while the same amount in 10-year Treasury notes would have
grown to about $18,000 following a 6.1 percent annualized return,
according to data compiled by Bloomberg. A $10,000 investment in
the Reuters/Jefferies CRB Index of 19 raw materials increased 3.3
percent a year to $13,803. Gold futures rose 14 percent a year,
turning $10,000 into $37,852.
snip


And yet I read countless Leftwingers all ****y and nasty about folks
who bought gold and have sat on it.

So, do you recommend buying gold now? Or what are you saying, exactly?

How many of the current gold holders bought it at a low? How many of
them will sell at the high? How many will buy at the high and sell at
a low? We do not know that. We know one thing only: they will not any
dividends from their gold holdings, no matter when they bought or sold.

There is a particular category of people who predict the future by
extrapolating the past. Those are the ones who would say "stocks
always outperform bonds in the long run" or "gold has been doing
great, I want to get on the bandwagon" or "we are in for a repeat of
Great Depression because stocks are falling".

Those are the same kinds of people who bought homes because their
prices were rising.

This mentality of extrapolating they past without thinking always
leads to ruinous financial results, due to buying into overhyped
assets.

I consider gold to be overhyped at present, and, as a result, I will
not invest in it. I have no idea how high it will go, but I am just
not going to participate.

My personal investment results from my investments that I had (and
kept throughout) from year 2000, are roughly 90.4% total cumulative
return. This does not include any additional investments that I made
with savings from years after January 2000. Only the investments that
I had in the beginning of the decade, which I still happen to be
carrying.

To a large extent, the reason for this modest, but respectable gain is
not doing anything particularly brilliant, but simply avoiding fads
of both bullish and bearish nature.

While not as spectacular as the return on gold, I feel that 90% over a
decade is a good result, considering the more typical outcomes, and it
does establish a certain level of credibility as far as my investment
mentality is concerned.

i