Great overview and background on Gold as a Commodity over at Crossing Wallstreet.

The summary for current investors is…
My view is that the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates earlier than expected. I don’t know exactly when that will be but it will put gold on a dangerous path. For now, my advice is to stay away from gold, either long or short.
… but you should read the whole thing for a lot of interesting tidbits on the history of gold and how to track and trade it. Here’s another quote …

I wanted to provide a counterpoint to some recent articles posted on Investorgeeks that have suggested commodities are not a good place to invest. More specifically, that the commodities boom is a high risk area of investing and potentially a giant bubble.

I have a different opinion. I personally feel that investing in commodities is the only way to ensure in the coming years that your portfolio is not decimated by hyper inflation.

The Present State of the US Economy

Before we discuss this further, we need to do a quick summary of the present state of the US (world) economy:

The PPI report came out today. While we are doing better than Zimbabwe, things are still a little scary.

I was having dinner with Chris last weekend, and I expressed concern over US inflation. He asked me what the numbers were, and I didn’t have them handy. Here are the numbers from a MarketWatch article on the January 2008 PPI report.

First, the most concerning number of all:

Year over year, the PPI is up 7.4% — the fastest pace since 1981. Also on an annualized basis, the core PPI is up 2.3%.

And here are some more details found at the end of the article: (after the jump)

Bill (CEO of WineLog) did a quick little post on Wine Investing over at the WineLog blog and introduced me to a site called WineInvestor.com.
A good site to learn about wine investing is wineinvestor.com. Wine Investor is collecting (in one place) all the types of information I would need to explore investing in wine. The guy that runs Wine Investor is from the financial services field, works with technology, and loves wine. What a killer resume.
Investing in wine could be a great way to diversify your portfolio. Especially if, like …

Energy prices are here, there and everywhere. Oil was trading at around 55, then went to 59, USD, March 07 futures are trading at 61 USD, and May 07 Futures are trading at 69 USD. Between now and May oil would have to increase 25%, which is a hefty premium.

A reader of my previous energy update said what I was thinking:

Oil closed on Nov 3 at 59.14 USD per barrel. These days there are some jittery news that could cause the price of oil to increase. Cramer in his 24-10-2006 podcast said that oil futures were driven up by the hedge funds. I agree and said so in July and Fortune said the same in May of this year. History is that, history, and the question is, where is oil headed in the future?
Let’s start with the basics and see where oil futures are trading. At the NYMEX the oil …

In a previous blog entry I talked about the price of oil. A couple of days ago I was watching Boone Pickens on CNBC. He was commenting on what direction oil will take, and in his words, “I think you’ll see $70 before you see $50.” This was the same individual that said, “80 before 60.” History has shown that oil did not reach 80, even though it was only a few dimes away from 80. I am going to cut Boone some slack in that oil did reach 80 before 60, but I will take Boone to task in that he was also saying oil would reach 100 USD.

In a previous blog entry, about a month and a half ago, I commented on how oil will not reach 100 USD per barrel. I posed the argument that to reach a doubling of the oil price would require the price to reach 160USD, which would have devasted the economies of the world. Now oil is dropping and some have commented that the price of oil will jump back up next year. I am skeptical that oil will jump up again, and I will share with you why I think oil or gas will have hard time edging back up again.