Faith-based investing: Gold

Here's an interesting thought: "Gold Is A Religion Masquerading As An Asset Class."

Gold remains close to its all-time high, as fears over government money printing, solvency, and general economic fears make the shiny yellow metal more popular than ever.
Experts recommend that you have a substantial chunk of your investments in this asset class.
But gold is not an asset class.

It's a religion.

And then there's this:

[G]old is a faith-based metal. It pays no dividend, cannot be eaten, and is mostly used for nothing more useful than jewelry. I would say that anything of which 75% sits idly and expensively in bank vaults is, as a measure of value, only one step up from the Polynesian islands that attached value to certain well-known large rocks that were traded. But only one step up. I own some personally, but really more for amusement and speculation than for serious investing. It may well work and it may not. In the longer run, I believe that resources in the ground, forestry, agriculture, common stocks, and even real estate are more certain to resist any inflation or paper currency crisis than is gold.

Over the long term - a few decades - equities outperform gold . (Which equities is of course the key question, but I mean market averages.) Gold may very well be a bubble but if it is its curve lags well behind the now-popped curves of the housing market and the NASDAQ Composite over the last nine years. So if gold is a bubble, it probably has a lot more room to grow. But that doesn't mean it will grow at all.

So what we are left with is the knowledge that gold is speculative. Well, yeah.