You can leave-out the smileys.
Personally, I'd consider it a valuable investment.
I read an article (on www.spiegel.de) a while ago about a farmer-turned-investment-adviser who tours the country explaining to farmers how the commodity future exchange for corn and pork works etc.
He's still a farmer but the excess-money he earns from his talks goes into state-securities and seeds.
No gold ;-)

My grandparents (maternal side) owned a farm (still in family posession) and when we were young, my mother used to recount to us how directly after the war, people from far away came around to scrounge lard.
Still makes me think twice about throwing food away ;-)

you can store the copper on your farm.

smiley was simply due to the pun (buying farm = to die).

i think buying a farm is a good idea. much more sensible than gold.

I'm simply correcting you on the usefullness of gold. It's not just a case of as Warren buffet says that you dig it up out of the ground, melt it down then dig a hole and put it back in.

It can be reclaimed. It hardly ever is however. This is just with the work I do, it may vary with others. I don't know.

Gold is up $1380+ but does not mean much to us who are Swissie orienteered while the US$ is down to .94xxCHF.
The more I think about it the more it is clear that most possible investments carry foreign currency risk (gold, commodities, shares, bonds &&) so maybe one should just stick to putting money directly into foreign currency speculations.

Anyway have booked my holiday in now cheap old USA

get into food futures, in particular meat. It's gonna baloon

agricultural commodities is one thing that i couldn't reach a conclusion on whether it was a good bet or not. of course since 2006 when i first thought of investing in ac, the price has gone up quite a bit. but i don't get that gut feeling which pushes me to invest.

corn, wheat, sugar. they've all gone up.

Meat will not ballon, it will become too expensive to produce, 1kg of porc/beef takes about 7kg of cereals to produce ! We'll just eat less meat and revert to more of a vegetarian diet.

other agricultural commodities will increase, but be careful, they all balloned in 2008 and came back down again. It took 6 months for them to rise to the dizzying heights they did and about 1 month to come crashing back down again.

You're probably right, but forcing food prices up causes someone somewhere to starve. I can't afford a farm, so would prefer food producing equities. It's a shame Unilever don't own much of their own production any more.

Are there any listed farmers or ag producers on the SWX, or are all Swiss farms privately owned? Googling 'farmer listed on the SWX' brings up weird farmer sex stories!

another option is to invest in farmland. again, back in 2006 i looked into farmland and also getting a tenant farmer. i think it would have been a reasonable investment, but way too much hassle.

interestingly, i heard today that if you invested 10k in apple stock when jobs took over in 1997, you should have over half a million dollars worth of apple stock now...

Yeah but it would be unfit for consumption

P.

Are you taking the pith?

Please any advice for buying credit suisse gold bars around 100 g .is it a good time to buy them? where is the best place?

buy credit suisse bars from credit suisse

From the credit suisse itself? in some countries they are bought from shop jewelers!!

yes from the bank.. this has been covered already a few pages back.

A Gold Bar ATM in Munich. I know this is not available (yet) in Switzerland but find the concept quite interesting and it speaks to the general queries about how & where to buy gold.

"In Germany, vending machines dispense everything from soft drinks to pregnancy kits. Now a local businessman has come up with an innovative new idea -- dispensing gold bars from machines. He plans to install his devices all around the world."

http://www.spiegel.de/international/...722986,00.html

I don't know much about investing in gold but this seems to me like a signal of a market peak trend.

Nobody knows what will happen to the price of gold. I think that it will be quite a bit higher in a year or two's time. But I also think that there will be a pullback before then - gold is currently overbought. But I could be wrong.

There are lots of audio podcasts relevant to gold here: http://www.financialsense.com/financial-sense-newshour
But most interviewees are pro gold. The most balanced (negative) are RObert Prechter & Jeffrey Christian on October the 8th. Robert Prechter is a hardcore deflationist, but has a very poor recent record for predicting POG (Price of Gold)

http://www.kitco.com/ is the biggest gold forum, but unsurprisingly it's full of gold bugs. Their resident expert, Jon Nadler, posts commentaires on their home page that are mostly negative about POG. But he's been wrong a lot lately too.

Of course, one day the negative guys will be right. Nobody knows when!

edit: personally, I wouldn't buy at these prices. But if I didn't have any gold, I'd be dollar cost averaging every month until I had 10% of my wealth in gold - that is what financial advisors always used to recommend before it became more profitable for bankers to sell their clients paper based investments.

I got some guidance from a good old friend (jeweller). Thought it would be helpful to share this information, ofcourse any thoughtful comments/corrections most welcome:

- Bottom line - Gold wont fade (it never has!). Key is to buy at different price points rather than one single bulk transaction.

- emerging markets India, Singapore, Dubai, China etc. wont let gold prices down, watch out for those peaks and dips & buy at the right price!

- buying gold in physical format is the best option. It could be jewellery, coins, bars - as long as you figure out where to store and where to sell when you need money

- dont support any paper based purchase, futures etc. (its over sold and therefore risky)

- silver is def under valued so as long as you can buy and forget it for the next 10 years its highly recco. (silver market is controlled by a tight network of London based individuals)

Errrm. Your Location is London... here in Zurich we have a bank called ZKB. This bank mainly serves Swiss grannies and one of their biggest hits is a ETF on gold - with a 1:1 physical back up. So for every gramm you buy, ZKB will store physical gold in their vault. Not risky at all and more convenient than those bars at home - nobody needs that many door stops....