We are living through times of great uncertainty, and many an investor is understandably looking askance at equities and bond markets right now. If one had invested $100 with, say, Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac at the beginning of the week, you’d be left with a little more than half that by the time Friday’s closing bell rang.

This uncertainty—as well as inflation, the swooning U.S. dollar, and a variety of other factors—has pushed more investors in recent months to put their money into gold, that time-tested way of maintaining value through times both thick and thin, in spite of the fact that owning gold outright actually costs investors money for storage.

That is, unless you opt to take physical delivery yourself, which reportedly more and more investors are doing. But storing precious metals on one’s own carries separate risks, including but not limited to Latvian supervillains. HedgeWorld recently heard the tale of one such investor who had a quantity of gold delivered to his Midwestern home; the only trouble was that it was delivered to his new house, still under construction at the time. The delivery was signed for by the workers, who promptly left the stack of very valuable boxes sitting in the front yard of the home… for over a week. And despite one of the boxes separating to reveal the sparkly content, no one, neither construction worker nor passerby, laid a—ahem—finger on the shipment. The precious cargo sat there until a very flustered investor hustled to reclaim them.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 11th, 2008 at 4:43 pm and is filed under Commodities, Odd Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.