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Stocks, agreed. I looked at some precious metal stocks three or four years ago, but didn't go into them. I'm sorry now. Futures can become worthless if you guess wrong or things turn out differently than expected. With stocks, you can lose or not gain, but unless the metals market completely collapses you'll still have something.
I looked at silver prices the other day for the first time in a few years (siince my wife stopped buying silver jewelry findings, whose prices change based on the metal market), and I was shocked to see that they'd near doubled, to eight bucks. Silver hasn't been at eight since the 70s, when the Hunt brothers briefly ran it up above 50 in an extremely ill-considered move to corner the world silver market. Silver is primarily an industrial metal. Apparently China and, to a degree India, is sucking up silver in its economic boom for use in production equipment, chemical processes, and so on.
What am I saying? If things go south in China -- their economic bubble bursts, we have a recession -- silver prices may drop. Gold, however, is more of a hedge investment against inflation, and if inflation comes back that will support the gold prices -- although the current price of gold, up $100 an ounce over a couple of years ago, may already reflect the weakness of the dollar and anticipation of higher interest rates and inflation in the U.S.
I have no particular idea of where to get more info than the newspaper, but I would recommend trolling google news regularly for articles and columns on precious metals in the world's papers. You can get a lot of good info by reading the perspectives from Singapore, Hong Kong, the Middle East, India, and other places where they really care about gold.
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