WC Varones

Radio gold-basher Dave Ramsey on his 3/24/16 show (hour 2, 30 mins in):

When you look at the track record, say, over 50 years, if you put money in gold 50 years ago, or you put money in a growth stock mutual fund 50 years ago, or you bought a house 50 years ago with the exact same amount of money, so we took $100,000 and we put it in there, and you visit 50 years later, you know, you would find that gold has about a 2% rate of return over that 50 years... It's done horribly!

The truth?  Not even close.  Gold was $35 in 1966, and is $1216 now.  That's a 7.35% annual return compounded over 50 years.  And it's 8.2% annually over the 45 years since Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard in 1971.  That's not quite as high as stock returns, but it's a hell of a diversifier due to its low correlation with stocks, and certainly deserves at least a few percentage points in any asset allocation.