Investing in Gold: How to Own It, How to Profit from It

Jane M. Wilson is a Toronto-based chartered financial analyst in the
investment business.

The authors, well-known figures in the gold mining and mutual fund
business, are unabashed gold bugs whose fellow believers filled halls
and sold similar books to retail investors more than 15 years ago. Their
ranks are now much diminished and their views often derided, but the
authors’ message is clear: those who forget history are doomed to
repeat it.

Their book makes the case for a resurgence in inflation and for gold as
a reliable historic and future hedge against it. The authors resort to
dubious tactics to extenuate gold’s poor performance in recent years
when they isolate a single advantageous year (1990) and extol gold’s
performance vis-а-vis the Brazilian cruzeiro (the latter may be of
interest to a few select readers). The book then plausibly describes the
political and economic imperatives that will once again force
governments to resort to expansionary monetary policy, and correctly
states that this process had already begun in 1992. Also reviewed are
current supply and demand factors.

The second half of the book describes different vehicles for investing
in gold, from bullion to options. One chapter explains the analysis of
shares of mining companies and compares relative values of Canadian
stocks, albeit with the unfortunate omission of the date and prevailing
market quote. The chapter on mutual funds highlights the Dynamic
Precious Metals Fund, with which the authors are intimately connected.
Graphs illustrating the performance of this fund are of little use, and
possibly misleading, given that there is no comparative study of other
funds. Additional graphs are used to illustrate historical gold price
relationships and simple option returns. There is also an alphabetical
index and a glossary of investment terms and colloquialisms.