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Old 12-21-2015, 03:12 PM
 
Location: Houston/Brenham
5,819 posts, read 7,203,940 times
Reputation: 12315

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Quote:
Originally Posted by TuborgP View Post
So far we are up to 13 posts does anyone have any results for themselves, family or friends? That was the question not if it was reasonable. As Vision67 noted a lot of Gold has been sold over the last decade to personal investors many of whom were or are now retired. Is there no anecdotal stories around about them?
Who wants anecdotal stories? Why do you care if someone won or lost a bundle?

Google gold prices. Then make up whatever time frame you want and pretend someone answered.

Commodities are not an investment for the average person.
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Old 12-21-2015, 03:20 PM
 
31,679 posts, read 40,965,089 times
Reputation: 14424
Quote:
Originally Posted by astrohip View Post
Who wants anecdotal stories? Why do you care if someone won or lost a bundle?

Google gold prices. Then make up whatever time frame you want and pretend someone answered.

Commodities are not an investment for the average person.
Why do you care that so care? I care because I want to and intellectual curiosity can do that:
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Old 12-21-2015, 03:33 PM
 
Location: Concord, CA
7,153 posts, read 9,253,895 times
Reputation: 25439
Actually, gold is making a bounce up now. GLD has been up about 2.8% in the past 3 trading days.
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Old 12-21-2015, 03:59 PM
 
Location: USA
7,776 posts, read 12,409,069 times
Reputation: 11812
Many years ago when I first began to invest, I put $1,000 into gold. Before long it was $2,000. I sold. The price is so high now, I guess I wouldn't consider buying gold. Back then I was too anxious to sell. Later I learned to not do that.
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Old 12-21-2015, 04:58 PM
 
31,679 posts, read 40,965,089 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by PNW-type-gal View Post
My inlaws bought HEAVILY into the fear-monger Porter Stansbury's advice and went pretty much all-in on metals, "investment" coins and diamonds along with stocks (TSX and pink sheets) for miners and oil and gas. I just got done liquidating things at pennies on the dollar they paid- my FIL died in Jan 2014 and I estimate their accounts lost nearly 50% between his death and the time my MIL died this last Thanksgiving. Of course, if you look at timing, the accounts were riding high when the price of oil and gold was high - but as the prices started to fall, they were too afraid to pull some profit off the table.

The investment coins (the ones Stansbury recommended) were where they really got taken, imo, most of those are simply worth bullion value with almost no numismatic value past that. They'd been buying precious metal (mostly gold but also silver and platinum) since probably the 70s. If they'd stopped buying in, say, 1995 or so, they'd have done okay, but the older they got the more frightened they got (particularly after the election of Obama) and they were investing heavily around the peak.
This is exactly what I was wondering about and Porter Stansberry was one of the gold hawks I was most interested in learning results about from his followers. His scary tv and radio spots have been seen/heard by many. Ron Paul is now a spokesperson and I was wondering how many it has worked out for.
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Old 12-21-2015, 05:27 PM
 
Location: None
218 posts, read 174,657 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TuborgP View Post
Why do you care that so care? I care because I want to and intellectual curiosity can do that:
What?
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Old 12-21-2015, 05:44 PM
 
Location: Nebraska
2,234 posts, read 3,308,443 times
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Gold is not an investment, it is an asset wealth preservation financial tool used by countries and large banks as a diversification vehicle and insurance. This only applies to physical gold. Paper gold such as "GLD" is fools game.
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Old 12-22-2015, 12:49 AM
 
Location: San Francisco
21,474 posts, read 8,665,544 times
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I have a story to tell about how gold can be a very bad investment. It's a sad story. My father was a gold hawk. He didn't trust banks, was convinced that the economy would collapse and believed that paper money would be worthless. His survival strategy was to start hoarding precious metal.

He began in the 1960s with silver quarters after the U.S. government announced that they were going to stop making pure silver coins. Then he graduated to gold in the early 1970s. He bought gold bars, silver bars and coins. By the time he died, he had a stash that was probably worth several hundred thousand dollars. One day when I was visiting him he showed me his hoard, which he kept in the freezer, and let me handle one gold bar to see how heavy it was.

After my father died all that gold and silver became the property of my stepsister, who was my father's favorite. She kept it hidden in her house for years and considered it her security for retirement. Then my stepsister got divorced and moved to an apartment building. One day she made the mistake of mentioning her stash during a heated phone argument with her ex. She did this while standing outside on her balcony. Shortly afterward, all the gold and nearly all the silver was stolen from her apartment. She believes that someone must have overheard her, waited for her to leave and then burglarized the place.

My father would be rolling in his grave if he knew what had happened to the fortune in gold and silver that he'd been carefully accumulating for 20 years as a hedge against an economic crisis that existed only in his imagination.
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Old 12-22-2015, 01:21 AM
 
Location: Los Angeles
4,488 posts, read 3,908,706 times
Reputation: 14536
Every time I hear William Devane try and convince people to transfer their entire retirement savings into a "gold-backed IRA", I think he should be arrested. But that's just me.
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Old 12-22-2015, 03:36 AM
 
Location: Southern California
1,166 posts, read 1,629,097 times
Reputation: 2904
Quote:
Originally Posted by TuborgP View Post
So far we are up to 13 posts does anyone have any results for themselves, family or friends? That was the question not if it was reasonable. As Vision67 noted a lot of Gold has been sold over the last decade to personal investors many of whom were or are now retired. Is there no anecdotal stories around about them?
I bought some gold in the early 2000's in the $300/ounce range, but not enough to make a huge difference in my retirement a few years from now. I didn't buy it in response to anything I read or heard on the radio, I just had some extra funds and thought it would be fun to own some actual gold coins. I also bought some silver around the same time, but later sold it to pay off the mortgage on a rental property. Looking back through my retrospectroscope, I would have liked to have bought more when it was that price, and sold it all when it was over $1,800/ounce. But I've never lost any sleep over it. I certainly don't regret buying it, but it was nothing more than dumb luck that the price has increased as much as it has.

Last edited by simbared; 12-22-2015 at 03:52 AM..
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