Investments - what's working out for you?

Since the inception of the market, publicly-traded shares in corporations have beat the shit out of everything else around. but to an actual human investor "STOCKS" over a "CENTURY" is a performance metric that's about as useful as "HORSES" over "550 YARDS."

Sure, stocks is a broad category, and a century is a long time, but gold is gold.

yeah stence, I just started reading some of those Times magazine pieces last night. Of course, given our conversation here, one of the first things I turned to was the article on gold bugs, and I was pleased to see that Metcalf touched (however briefly) on the main problem with gold: like all other commodities, it is subject to the forces of supply and demand, and really has no fixed intrinsic value in and of itself. Like paper money, it is a medium of exchange. But Metcalf doesn't take the final step. If gold really does hold out the "chimerical" possibility that "one day we might pierce the veil of money," then we have to ask ourselves, what is that we expect to find once the veils are lifted?

Anyhow, I read the article on hedge funds, too, which was really interesting. I printed out Asness's paper on stock options to read later.