Hedges..........................

"Gold was selling for $34 an ounce and silver was trading at 90 cents an ounce in 1935.  Gold's rise to $1,800 and ounce and silver's rise to $33 an ounce 77 years later make for a compounded annual return of less than 5.5 percent (5.29% if I'm doing my sums correctly).  It doesn't take an Einstein to figure our that in the same time frame, the Standard & Poor's 500 Index and the Dow Jones Industrial Average produced better results of 8.4 percent in compounded annual returns.  Even beetleheads know that 20th century paintings by Warhol, de Kooning, Pollack, Kandinsky, Malevich and Rothko have outpaced inflation at the speed of light.  Classic cars, handguns - such as Lugers, Colts, and Thompsons - rare coins, rare stamps, old maps, photographs by Stieglitz, Adams and Stichen, and sculptures by Saint-Gaudens, Remington, and Calder have proved to be superior to gold and silver as inflation hedges."
-Malcolm Berko (excerpted from here)