<p>How much gold do you need to pay for a year at Yale? 1000 grams, same as in 1900. For non-metric thinkers, that’s about 35 ounces, or 2.2 pounds. Per year.</p>
<p>Unless great grandma happened to sock away about ten pounds of gold, though, this information doesn’t make the cost of an Ivy education seem any more affordable. </p>
<p>Both gold and the cost of higher education have had big runs in price (measured in dollars) since the beginning of the last century. For those of us paying in dollars, both are costly.</p>
<p>Much of the gains in gold are only in the last 20 years. Gold went up the $800s a few decades ago and came down to the $250 area around 2000 (where I started buying it; I stopped buying it, outside of giving them for gifts, at $412) and has zoomed up since then. I think that college tuition has had a steadier rise up.</p>
<p>Most people think of gold in terms of ounces as most coins worldwide are one-ounce of gold (that may actually weigh a little more because of added hardeners).</p>
<p>You would have done better with the gold mining companies in the runup. Gold mining companies went up 10-fold during the great depression. Homestake Mining (acquired by Barrick 8 or 9 years ago) was a good example. They paid out an incredible amount of money in dividends many, many decades ago.</p>
<p>This doesn’t help me pay our student’s tuition, room, board etc.
Yale’s Fin-aid formulas are “secret” and don’t resemble what the IRS says is your income.</p>
<p>Investing in something based on past trends is invalid science and no guarantee of future performance. If you could go back in time, probably you should also pick up some Microsoft, Intel or Google stocks while you are at it !!!</p>
<p>Technical analysis is pervasive in trading markets today, including gold futures. Technical analysis depends on past price and volume. The most successful trading systems that I’ve read about are trend-following systems.</p>
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<p>There were a huge number of fundamental indicators on the bounce of gold in 2000-2001 and it was a pretty easy call to go long on precious metals and energy back then.</p>
<p>It’s nice to get in the ground floor of a company; I’ve done it many times.</p>
<p>Doug Noland (Prudent Bear Fund, Safe Harbor Fund), has written the Credit Bubble Bulletin weekly for at least a decade. He wrote about Enron back in January 2001 when the stock was at its heights. It went bankrupt late in 2001. His fund had puts on Enron from early 2001.</p>
<p>I actively trade and invest with my own risk capital. If I don’t pick winners before the fact, then I lose money. So I need to pick more winners than losers.</p>
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<p>There is nothing wrong with buying into a bubble. You just have to get out before the bubble pops and then go short. The best times to make fortunes are when there are bubbles and when they pop.</p>
<p>BCEagle, it sounds like you are knowledgeable in the investment market. I was wondering if you had any advice for an aspiring student of the ‘game’. I am an aspiring engineer at UW Madison but have always been extremely interested in the market of investments/stocks. I will not have funds to invest for quite a while as I may be continuing on to attain a Masters degree, but I have every intention of knowing exactly what to do with it when I do. Any book recommendations regarding the investment market for beginners?</p>
<p>This stuff should be pretty easy for an engineering student. You can just read through intro accounting and finance texts at your library, assuming that you have a school of business in your university. I have Technical Analysis of the Financial Markets by John Murphy as a basic TA book but you can find a lot of this information on stockcharts.com chart school.</p>