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Ray Dalio has been recommending gold... not in a "put all your money in it" manner, but more like "put 7-10% of your portfolio in it" as a way to protect agains

Ray Dalio has been recommending gold... not in a "put all your money in it" manner, but more like "put 7-10% of your portfolio in it" as a way to protect against the market movements that are bad for both stocks and bonds, which in turn apparently tend to be good for gold. I don't know if this is that situation though, or if this is part of what he calls "pushing on a string". It's hard to make sense of all this. Supposedly, every 75-100 years there are Big corrections, but I thought the idea was that that was what we went through ten years ago, with the debt crisis and the "beautiful deleveraging" etc. So if that's true we're more looking at a run-of-the-mill recession coming at some point. But on the other hand maybe that crisis ten years ago wasn't actually the Big One.

short_sells_poo 7y ago
Gold is weird, and I find it very disingenuous when it gets recommended to uninformed investors . Gold would not have protected you in 2008 for example. As a matter of fact, it sold off at first, further compounding the headaches of anyone who was using it as a hedge. It started gaining along with the recovery in the stocks. I'm not saying you are uninformed or Ray Dalio recommended it to uninformed investors. However, these things then get picked up and parroted by less scrupulous individuals.
- tunesmith 7y ago
  No worries, I've experienced more than a few gold recommendations from folks that have otherwise showed poor judgment, so I've always been suspicious. Dalio has so far made sense to me, but man... trying to figure out how to dip into gold as a run-of-the-mill investor is not easy, at least not through Fidelity. It's either high fees or buying into gold mining stocks which doesn't seem quite right. So, in the absence of going full-time into the investor rabbit hole, I'm guessing I'll be in the same boat as everyone else, trying to keep my stock/bonds allocation model rebalanced every few months as it theoretically all goes through the floor together. :-/
  - watoc 7y ago
    The easiest way is usually to trade one of the ETFs that track gold price (some of them are backed by physical gold while others use futures or other derivatives on gold).

short_sells_poo 7y ago

Gold is weird, and I find it very disingenuous when it gets recommended to uninformed investors . Gold would not have protected you in 2008 for example. As a matter of fact, it sold off at first, further compounding the headaches of anyone who was using it as a hedge. It started gaining along with the recovery in the stocks. I'm not saying you are uninformed or Ray Dalio recommended it to uninformed investors. However, these things then get picked up and parroted by less scrupulous individuals.

tunesmith 7y ago
No worries, I've experienced more than a few gold recommendations from folks that have otherwise showed poor judgment, so I've always been suspicious. Dalio has so far made sense to me, but man... trying to figure out how to dip into gold as a run-of-the-mill investor is not easy, at least not through Fidelity. It's either high fees or buying into gold mining stocks which doesn't seem quite right. So, in the absence of going full-time into the investor rabbit hole, I'm guessing I'll be in the same boat as everyone else, trying to keep my stock/bonds allocation model rebalanced every few months as it theoretically all goes through the floor together. :-/
- watoc 7y ago
  The easiest way is usually to trade one of the ETFs that track gold price (some of them are backed by physical gold while others use futures or other derivatives on gold).