@above; gold stocks correlation with bullion gets destroyed during crises and crashes. I.e. it's not a great hedge. Apart from this most gold stocks can be specified as a 2 factor model w.r.t. the domestic index and the gold price, where the mean of both coefficients is very positive. So you're getting positive risk exposure from 2 sources with gold stocks instead of just 1 source from gold. Standard factor model assumptions state that the E[r] should be equivalently higher due to the higher systematic risk.
For "when" to buy gold, the best timings based on empirical data are revealed in this working paper:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c...act_id=1989593
Don't listen to anyone without empirical data. The human brain is very well known for seeing patters where absolutely 0 patterns exist (e.g. time series data such as financial market data which is mostly just brownian motion type noise).
Last edited by computer1011; 10-11-2012 at 04:42 AM.