2008 was an interesting year for gold and silver investing. Towards year's end we saw record numbers of new investors who chose to get into gold and silver investing, forgoing the usual stocks and realty investment options that have become turbulent and unpredictable, to put it nicely, over the last few years.
People have opted to buy into metals for a very simple reason: Metals investing is simply more stable. Stock investments can go belly up, investment banks can close and realty prices can plummet. Meanwhile, while gold and silver do have their ups and downs, the historical tendency has always been for metal prices to rise over time and this is exactly why gold and silver investing is growing in popularity while fewer and fewer companies are offering solid 401K packages.
Most recently, precious metal investment grade coins have become a very popular option for gold and silver investing. This is due simply to their convenience. If you're new to metals and want to buy gold and silver you might think of bars and bricks, and that's easy enough if you're a billionaire, but gold and silver St. Gaudens and similar coins make it easy to put a few hundred dollars into your metals investment at a time. When you see that the prices of gold and silver are about to rise you can simply buy gold and silver coins, just enough to top your investment off and then not worry about it. Likewise if you need a little cash for a rainy day, you don't need to cash in thousands of dollars worth of metal at a time, you can simply sell as many coins as you need to sell in order to meet your goals or take care of unforeseen circumstance.
It's simply a smart option. Where stocks and realty have become wild and unpredictable, precious metals have almost always been solid to some extent. Certainly metals do have their declines now and then, but the price almost invariably tends to recover quite quickly. True, the pay off for metals may be less "explosive" than stocks, which have a tendency to rise overnight, but that also means that metals won't crash overnight either.
It's certainly a good thing that more and more people are turning to metals as the foundation of their investments and we can only hope that they retain these metals investments. In the past there has been something of a tendency for people to jump into gold and silver investing during times of crisis, only to cash in the minute the American dollar starts to take a turn for the better.
The fact is that you'd be wise to hold onto your metals investments in times of both economic strife and economic ease. Metals are not a "desperation" option, but rather an option to keep investors from ever having to become desperate. By keeping some amount of money in metals as opposed to cash, investment accounts, or other options, you should be able to always have money for a rainy day.
Learn more about gold and silver investing with GoldSilver.org and receive your free "2009 Insider's Guide To Precious Metal Investing."
