Gold Even Reigns On Stock Market

lehldk

金子可以了，再涨，那得有相当的想象力。钱只有贬值一条道。
Gold bugs just notched one more victory over the naysayers.

SPDR Gold Shares, the giant gold exchange-traded fund, is now the biggest such fund by assets, surpassing the SPDR S&P 500 ETF, which tracks the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index.

The gold fund, known by its ticker symbol GLD, added $1.2 billion in assets Monday, to reach a total of $77.5 billion, as gold prices climbed 2%. The S&P 500 crept up 0.03%. The gold fund first passed the S&P fund, known by its ticker SPY, on Friday, when it closed with $76.7 billion in assets to SPY's $74.4 billion. Both funds are managed by State Street Corp.


Brett Arends explains on The News Hub why he thinks Gold could soon hit $3000 an ounce as he compares the meteoric rise in the precious metal to the bubbles in the Nasdaq and real estate.
Investors' move away from stocks and into gold reflects the risk aversion that has gripped the markets in fits and starts in recent years. Fearful that the U.S. and other developed nations will spend years digging themselves out of debt, investors worry that stocks will therefore underperform. And they believe that gold will provide protection against declines in the value of other assets and currencies, including the U.S. dollar.

Gold's long rally has bolstered that belief. Bullion futures rose 2% to $1,888.70 per troy ounce on Monday in New York trading, up for the sixth consecutive trading day and 16% this month. Prices have risen for each of the past 10 years, and are up 32.9% in 2011, which would make this year the biggest percentage gain of the long bull market in gold if the gains hold.

GLD, marketed under the banner of State Street Global Advisors, has a big win for the World Gold Council, which formed the fund in the hopes of expanding the pool of gold buyers. Since it launched in 2004, GLD has grown into a market power, attracting legions of small investors as well as big-name hedge-fund managers such as John Paulson and George Soros.

The fund has been one of the few ways for investors to easily move in and out of gold, since ETFs trade on stock exchanges like stocks. GLD is widely seen as helping drive the gains in the gold price, because each share represents one-10th of an ounce of physical gold. As the fund grows, so do its gold holdings.

Paulson & Co. is the largest holder of GLD, with 31.5 million shares, according to Capital IQ. Northern Trust Corp., BlackRock Inc., Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch & Co. are also large holders of GLD, according to Capital IQ.

In August, gold ETFs as a group have added $2.2 billion in assets, more than any other category, according to IndexUniverse, a San Francisco-based research firm. The total for the segment is now $84 billion, an increase of 2.5% since the beginning of August.

Money managers are divided over whether gold has become dangerously overpriced or whether it has become an indispensible hedge against the risk of currency devaluations, chiefly because the supply is relatively fixed and the asset can't be devalued at a government's whim. Skeptics note that gold doesn't throw off any income, unlike many other investments, such as dividend payments from stocks.

ETFs have helped high-net-worth individuals use gold as an insurance policy against stock-market declines, says Matthew Rubin, director of investment strategy at Neuberger Berman. Clients have been inquiring about increasing their exposure to gold in recent weeks, he said. The firm has some 1.5 million shares of GLD, according to Capital IQ.

"The question is whether it's going to become too expensive of an insurance policy," Mr. Rubin says. "But, a year ago, people were saying it was overpriced. I think as long as there's uncertainty, people are going to continue investing in it."

Steve Cucchiaro, chief investment officer of Windhaven Investment Management Inc., a subsidiary of Charles Schwab Corp., which has nearly $7 billion under management, says he added gold to clients' portfolios after the Internet bubble burst in 2001. Since the financial crisis of 2008, he has added more as a way to combat interest rates so low they are negative after inflation.

"We think that will cause an upward pressure on the price of gold," he says. Mr. Cucchiaro's minimum allocation to gold ETFs has been 4%, he says, with some clients having as much as 12%, depending on their risk tolerance. "The allocation has helped keep people's minds at ease."

Others disagree.

"Gold is a phenomenon of fear," says Rick Ferri, founder of Portfolio Solutions LLC says. Mr. Ferri uses ETFs heavily in his clients' portfolios, but says he has stayed away from gold ETFs because of an overall aversion to commodities.

So far this month, there has been a 36% increase in assets in inverse gold funds, which essentially bet against the rise of gold, says Paul Baiocchi, an analyst at IndexUniverse. "There are certainly people out there who don't believe the story and are putting their money where their mouth is," he says.

"Whenever an asset gets securitized, that tends to raise its price level in the short term and lower its expected returns in the long term," says William Bernstein of Efficient Frontier Advisors, an investment manager in Eastford, Conn. The influx of new investors, he explains, gives a quick boost to returns, but the sudden surge of popularity then raises prices so high that future gains are harder to sustain.

"The historical return on gold, going back centuries, has been around zero [after inflation]," says Mr. Bernstein. "Going forward, it may be less than zero."

6th-Sense

TO 5000............

snowrider

6th-Sense 发表于 2011-8-30 11:56
TO 5000............

這個偶喜歡!
來個 all time high!

(先等等偶這波空倉收了後再開始)