By now, you have either put a little of your precious savings into gold or you have thought about it seriously. With the advent of gold ETFs (technically a misnomer, they are not truly Fs) it 
has never been easier to buy and sell the stuff. And at around $1200 an ounce, gold is up an impressive 50% or so since the fall of ‘08 and has gained an annualized 12.4% a year for the past decade.
Of course, for most investors, the fact that gold has done well lately is more or less the entire argument in favor of buying it. Subtle justifications are available, but, let’s face it, none of them are as powerful as the primal urge to join the party while you still can.
But when you get down to it, gold is one the more peculiar investments out there. Although it is an exaggeration to say that it is a substance of no intrinsic value, it has several industrial uses and would undoubtedly have many more if it were not so expensive, gold lacks some basic characteristics of a typical investment.
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By 2pm on May 6, 2010, it was clear that the stock market was having a bad day. The Greek Crisis was going through one of its spasms of fear and uncertainty. It was also the day of the UK general election, and by mid-
afternoon in New York it was becoming clear that the result would be some flavor of a hung parliament. The S&P 500 was down –2.9%, a decline that only a few years ago would have been considered headline news but is now mundanely bad.
Then over the next 46 minutes, the decline accelerated to the point where it became severe, then horrendous, and finally absurd. At about 2:46 the S&P was down about –8.6%. I say “about” because at that point the basic fabric of the marketplace was breaking down and exactly what the S&P was trading at, and when, is not clear even months later.
And then, as if the market fairy who had caused this twitched her wand in the other direction, the market staged its best ten minute rally in history. By 2:55 the S&P was down only -3.9% on the day. It would close down –3.2%.
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On the last Tuesday of every month two pieces of data are released. We get the monthly update on the Case-Shiller Home Price Index, which is based on thousands of real estate transactions, in which real families spend what is often their life savings. And we get the monthly number from the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index, which is based on a short questionnaire sent to 5000 households asking them how optimistic they feel.
Yesterday the C-S 20 City Composite showed a nice little uptick, +0.8% for April, +3.8% year on year. That reversed a few months of downticks and was reassuring to those of us rooting for stability in the housing market.
The CCI, on the other hand, was down to 52.9 from 62.7. That undoes two months of gains and returns us to a point just above the March level.
How did the stock market react? Was it cheered by what households actually did with their money in April or depressed by what they said to pollsters in June? The S&P was down –3.1%.
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I think the folks at WalletPop must be running some kind of obvious headline contest. Yesterday they carried Airlines Rake in Billions from Extra Fees and Majority of Social Network Users Share Too Much. And today we get Study: Longer Life Can Bring Pension Money Woes.
I’m willing to forgive WalletPop some for that last one. They are a bunch of kids who probably have not thought much about retirement. They do not yet realize that one of the biggest challenges in retirement planning, maybe even the single biggest one, is the somewhat counter-intuitive fear of living too long.
If you are retiring on an old-school pension or annuity, which will pay you a certain amount every month as long as you are around to cash the checks, then living a long time is not much of a fiscal danger. Social Security works the same way.
But if you reach that golden moment of retirement with a pile of money that needs to last as long as you do, longevity risk is a tough problem. Interestingly, it has a fairly tidy solution, but nobody likes it.
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I cannot remember if I have disclosed this before, but I own some Goldman Sachs stock. It is not a particularly large position, less than 1% of my net 
worth. But it worries me. I came close to selling yesterday and might just let it go today.
It is not that I don’t think Goldman is a great company. And it is certainly not that I think the stock is overpriced. With a trailing PE of less than 7 and no obvious threat to near term profits, it is, or ought to be, compellingly cheap.
The problem is that there is a chance, maybe not a big one, but a significant one, that the stock will go to zero. Not because of a problem in Goldman’s business, nor because the firm did anything it should not have, but because the federal government will decide to destroy it. Basically, I am worried that Goldman will get lynched.
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has never been easier to buy and sell the stuff. And at around $1200 an ounce, gold is up an impressive 50% or so since the fall of ‘08 and has gained an annualized 12.4% a year for the past decade.
Investing | Frank Curmudgeon | 
July 19, 2010 11:59 am | 
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