In the past year I am up 41% (beat the S&P500), in the past three years 57% (beat the S&P500), in the past five years 78% (didn’t beat the S&P500).
Since the January 1, 2000, I have soundly beaten the hot NASDAQ 100 QQQ ETF, even including reinvestment of QQQ dividends. From 1/1/2000 I am up 899%, and QQQ was “only” up 577%.
What stock am I?
Take a swing at this piñata, girls and boys!
aapl would be my guess.
My first guess would be AMZN but I think it’s up way more than those numbers, so maybe COST ?
Both of you…
(Bzzzzzt)
Next!
I won’t let this go on too much longer. The answer will shock some people.
Would it be JPM? 
Well I was a bit deceitful. It’s an ETF not a stock.
It’s GLD, the ETF whose sole asset is physical gold bullion.
The point of the exercise is to demonstrate that performance can come from unexpected, unwatched corners.
The nice thing about gold is that it’s not correlated to stocks or bonds so it tends to zug while the others zig and zag. It makes a portfolio more robust. It’s volatile however and it can suck for years at a time, even decades (1980-2000).
It’s possibly responding to all of the crises and tensions in the world, and foreign central banks are getting rid of their US Dollar reserves and swapping in gold - because the Dollar is now used politically to punish perceived US enemies. It’s probably responding to US budget concerns, too.
It’s surging despite a strong Dollar and sort-of high interest rates. Those are normally headwinds.
I suspect that some year in the future I’ll post a similar post about another asset class which no one cares about now in early 2025, but is attractively priced right now. Retail investors always chase prices up to a crest, then they panic sell at or near the bottom.
This is not investment advice. I’m not your advisor.
Speaking of gold. Why not own real gold and have the advantage of owning a doomsday currency and an investment at the same time?
A pound of gold doesn’t take up any more space than a couple of hard drives or a few file folders.
And today a pound of gold is worth $46K.
I agree with you. I don’t own the ETF. But I don’t think it’s a currency in the sense of you or I being about to buy things with it directly. I think I’ll always have to redeem at a trusted dealer for US Dollars, and THEN buy my goods & services.
I shop here: Amazon, Ebay, Temu, Kroger, HEB, Aldi, Walmart, Petsmart, Costco, Cost Plus Drug by Mark Cuban, American United Delta Airlines, Budget Car Rental, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Levi Strauss stores, etc. and ZERO of them take gold!
In what scenario would gold be viewed as a doomsday currency ? I think our biggest apocalyptic event in the last 25 years would be when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and completely wiped out electricity, cell phone service, water service, roads, houses and other infrastructure for weeks. Granted that this is a very localized scenario, but a gold bar would not have done very much for you in that scenario. However, generators, gasoline, food, and bottled water would have been extremely valuable.
So paint me a picture when having physical gold would be a valuable form of currency or barter… because it has zero utility.
Gold is not a medium of exchange. It’s only a currency the same way you might buy Euros or Yen of UK Pounds on the foreign exchange market for trading purposes. But no one is taking Euros, Yen, or UKP where we live.
That’s how I view gold - it’s a hedge against “weird, bad stuff”. And to be honest, I don’t see spending it in my lifetime, I will pass it to my two kids most probably. So it won’t create any taxable events while I live. But if it goes to the absolutely effing moon (imagine $10,000+), and starts taking up 1/3 or 1/2 of the portfolio then yes, I’ll have to trim it back to a reasonable % and pay the tax.
What’s “weird bad stuff”? A deep recession. US defaulting on it’s debt. War. A giant 8.0+ earthquake on the West Coast. The usual suspects! They happen. Sometimes in clusters.
I have been on the roller coaster of Nvidia and you have to have a tough skin for that one. Recently I cashed out most of the stocks which I manually managed. It is just too volatile.
By the way, I used to get gold for free!
Well, almost free. There was the tent, sluice, pan, shovel, gas to get to North Georgia and so on. However, it was a great hobby. I found gold nuggets and flake gold. I always had to laugh when I watched the Gold Rush television series because (at least how it was editied) I could see many of those people making major mistakes while prospecting and I am certainly not the expert.
Anyway, gold prospecting was one of two ways I got free money. The second was in Appalachia along the road where the coal trucks and trains dropped coal at turns. Free energy just for the picking!
A global war, with the Internet, DC. NYC, SFO, ATL, SF, LA and SEA taken out, would disable all dollar-based trade. After that happens the important things are food and shelter. Gold and silver coins can be exchanged for the items you need. You can take an axe and cut a one-ounce gold coin into four pieces.
If anyone remains around for very long gold and silver coins will likely become the medium of exchange, aka: currencey. It is easy to make a simple balance scale to measure tiny amounts of gold and silver.
The geology of Appalachia is mind boggling complex. Even before it folded and faulted into the mountains you see today, it was stitched together from many micro continents, some of which were gold bearing.
The White Mountains of NH are from a magma hotspot, just like the Hawaiian Island chain
I don’t blame you for selling NVDA, mostly I use ETFs, and I do torture myself with a few individual gold miners. Extremely extremely risky, but they are starting to pay off. But if I had thought it through I wouldn’t have bought them. It turns out GLD and other ETFs financialized gold bullion so that gold miners have become unnecessary and unpopular. Thus, gold itself has been beating miners. Miners are more of a put option on gold these days. So when I sell someday, no more miners for me.
Interesting things happen when you mix time, molten rocks, marine coral and changing levels of salt water. The results produced make some of the most beautiful and awe-inspiring places on earth.
Here’s one of my favorites:
Just south of Austin TX, there was exactly this kind of volcanic island coral atoll… it’s an old volcano called Pilot Knob, and the coral atoll is now McKinney Falls State Park.
In a doomsday scenario, who will take your gold? Nothing has value unless someone wants it.
And, just FYI: “ As of December 2024, U.S. stocks had an average 10-year return rate of 13.1 percent, whereas gold had a return rate of 8.33 percent .”
In Clark’s email newsletter today. You’re welcome, Clark!
Should You Buy Gold Right Now?
With tariffs in the headlines most of 2025, gold prices continue to break all-time highs.
Gold sat near $2,000 per ounce at the beginning of last February before soaring to more than $2,850 per ounce last week.
Along with tariff headlines, the U.S. dollar fell 0.9% last week, making gold cheaper for those that hold other currencies.
The narrative around gold is that it’s a hedge against inflation and political uncertainty. But the higher interest rates are, the less attractive gold is, as it doesn’t offer any yield (like, say, a high-interest savings account or CD).
Still, gold has beaten the S&P 500 in returns since 2000. Why not go all in with your investment?
Not so fast! Clark says buying precious metals such as gold and silver “are not investments.” {So then fine art and arable farmland aren’t investments, either I guess}
Clark says it’s OK to hold up to 5% of your portfolio in gold. Here are his three other rules if you’re going to buy: {I disagree… 5% barely moves the needle}
Don’t physically hold the gold due to costs, large bid/ask spreads and needing to store it. {an ETF / ETN has counter party risks, physical has none, but yes, it could be stolen}
Buy through an ETF or ETN with an expense ratio of 0.25% or less (examples: IAU, BAR, SGOL and GLDM).
Make sure you aren’t basing your purchase on a “gloom and doom” theory about the U.S. and the economy. {Everyone should realize that -50% in the stock market is a not uncommon event, as Uncle Warren Buffet has said on so many occasions. Having a hedge for part of the portfolio is not being bearish. It’s being prudent}
The key words in your post are “political uncertainty.”
If someone had proclaimed in 2000 that gold would be 11x by 2025, they’d have been denounced as a nutjob. Yet… it happened. If you extrapolate the same rate of growth (10% per year) to 2040, you get $10,000 per ounce by 2040.
Gold prices extended their winning run on Monday to hit another record high as U.S. President Donald Trump said he will impose 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminium imports, including from Canada and Mexico, as well as other import duties later in the week.
Spot gold (XAUUSD:CUR) was up +1.44% to $2,900.56 an ounce by 5:42 am ET, having finished +1.9% higher last week, the metal’s sixth consecutive weekly gain and second-highest-ever close amid tariff concerns. Silver (XAGUSD:CUR) was up +1.49% to $32.30.
“Tariff concerns that risk higher inflation and slower economic growth are spurring demand for safe haven assets like gold,” ING analysts said.
Imagine a US without the Internet or telephony system, no NYC, Washington DC, ATL, Chicago, Denver, SFO, LAX or Miami. There would be no NY or Chicago exchange… a worst-case scenario.
Why do sovereign nations have gold reserves? If not gold, what do you think the the last resort for a medium of exchange might be?
Historical precedent shows that gold fills that vacum when the guarantors of paper money lose favor. Silver is a logical secondary choice for smaller denominations.
In a doomsday scenario, with no existing obvious predominate governing entity, gold and silver will likely be the medium of exchange for items necessary for survival. Small-arms ammunition might be a close second, the the sale of bullets would require gold in exchange.
