Gold is another tremendously overrated investment. If you read the previous article on diamonds you will be able to transfer most of that to gold as well, gold has bad historic price growth (way below inflation, except for a few short term blips), prices are volatile and if you are investing in the metal liquidity is bad as for diamonds.

"Goldbugs" with a paranoid streak collect gold bars for use as currency when world commerce finally does fail, but to be honest I think the idea of going down to the local baker and chipping off a bit of gold from your bar to buy bread is just too silly to imagine.  Post apocalyptic commerce is more likely going to be based on barter and firepower, so if you really feel that way about the future you should buy some guns and ammo then go into business digging nuclear shelters and running survival courses for your fellow lunatics. This is not the realm of investment!

Like most collectibles and hard assets they pay no dividend and earn no income aside from speculative gains or losses in capital value. Gold needs to be physically stored at great expense and you'll find a wide gap between retail prices and wholesale.

If you are afraid of the collapse of the world economy I suggest having a few gold stocks in your portfolio instead, but as far as investment sectors go this has not been a particularly good one, you just get the occasional sharp gain during high profile crises and then the price falls away. Futures traders might make a bit of money if they are lucky but guys storing bullion won't go anywhere.

The same applies to most other precious metals. As mining techniques improve we end up with a huge world surplus of most of these metals, which have only limited industrial application. Even platinum and palladium, essential catalysts with tremendous applications in chemistry and industry are not in much demand compared to supply, because chemists are constantly finding new catalysts and also find ways of making better use of these metals in trace amounts.

For example chemists have found that a mixture of carbon and platinum can be as effective as a pure platinum catalyst, but with less metal used. The price of Platinum fell substantially after this discovery.

Shortages in less well known metals, like Rhodium and Rhenium and Iridium and other relatively rare metals should be ignored by most amateur speculators, by the time some futures broker has called you to tell you about a short supply of these metals the price is already up and demand has been met by releasing some new supply. The newsgroup gets periodically spammed by people trying to flog investments in these metals, I suggest you ignore them.