Be very careful of this.
Telling someone invested through a large period of the 1900s of the bullish bias of the stockmarket and average compounded returns would not have helped, considering over numerous decades it barely moved (non-inclusive of dividends).
Your investment life will be very short in comparison to historical trends and you could get caught in a rut period (perhaps now for those in stocks "waiting" for them to climb back up).
Yeah fair enough, I agree that having a 2000 year bullish view may be nice in theory but not particularly useful for making money over a lifetime.
I'm working on a one to two year view that is bullish on gold. I'd certainly re-examine that if I felt it was pretty clear all the subprime land mines had been uncovered - that would be when all banks and institutions holding questionable debt had written it down properly and the credit markets started to show signs of life again. I think we're a way off from that.
In the short term the liquidity crisis is likely to cause a flight to cash and maybe we're heading into the cash stage of the cycle - which true to form is following the commodity stage just as the economic clock tells us it should.
This could cause say 6 months of churning in relation to gold as there are competing money flows (strong money flows out of gold as a commodity, a start of money flows into gold as a currency). Normally after the flight to cash and the final capitulation stage of other markets including the associated bankruptcies etc. there would be the slow return of investment out of cash and a slow return of confidence and the whole cycle would kick off again.
The only issue I have is that this time and with this cycle, it is cash itself, and the creation of it, that has caused the problem. In the past the 'malinvestment' was in a particular market sector (dot com, housing construction, etc.) but this time the mal investment seems to have been the actual creation of credit itself. That means the 'safety' of cash in past times of the final stage of the economic cycle is in question imo. Similarly the safety of the institutions responsible for protecting the cash is also in question (i.e. the banks).
This is why I'm still bulllish for gold over a 1 to 2 year timeframe. In the short term we might see a flight to cash out of commodities (gold being treated as a commodity), but then a little further, a flight out of cash and particular the USD into gold, which will happen very quickly if a couple of major banks blow up or instead of blowing up they are saved by massive cash creation exercises by central banks.
I see value in some of the new gold producers even if gold comes off another 5 %to 10%. I also saw/see the opportunity for even greater value appearing in the short term if there is continued sell down of some of these stocks as a result of a liquidity squeeze. (margin calls, opes debarcles, property lvrs deteriorating causing equity loan recalls, rate rises causing people and institutions to sell up stocks, commodities to reduce other debts etc.).
I debated a few months ago trying to trade down a significant portion of my position to capitalise on this but didn't do it. Instead I've been reallocating to greater value where I see it and also into less risky profile stocks (no debt producers with proven reserves or high quality near producers with good cash positions). I wouldn't risk trading significantly out of the bullish gold position even for a short period, because I see a risk at any time of a series of big credit blowups out of the blue that could kill the value of the USD very quickly.