It's very hard to stay ahead of inflation with securities whose value can be fudged by cheap money. In fact, pension funds can't even make +inflation guarantees, only best efforts through low-risk investments. And even if they did, they would be lying.
while I agree that this would make a very interesting chart, do you have a reference for that?
I mean it's clear that during the last 10 years, nothing has touched metals, but if you were in gold for the 10 years before that, things wouldn't have gone quite as well.
It gave me this thought..
2010 "Gold Always Goes Up" 2004 "House Prices Always Go Up" 1999 "The US stock market always goes up"
http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2010/09/chart-of-day-inflation-a...
Also, gold is tax-disadvantaged.
However, my understanding is that this is fairly easy to get around, either buy going for a ETF like GLD, buying stock in a company that owns gold 'in the ground'
For those who are enamored with gold and want to invest conservatively, I would look at something like the Permanent Portfolio (http://crawlingroad.com/blog/2008/12/22/permanent-portfolio-...) Not how I would invest personally, but the PP isn't an unreasonable approach.