Avoiding the golden mistake

[jducoeur]

Those who are nervous about the markets and contemplating pushing their money into gold might do well to take a look at yesterday's article in the Motley Fool. Suffice it to say, they make the point that, while gold tends to look good in the short run, it's generally a poor investment in the longer term. And most people are pretty bad at figuring out when the short term starts turning into the long.

Looking at it, it's pretty clear to me that gold is currently in the middle of a bubble, and getting steadily more over-valued. Piling out of one bubble into another is probably not the best strategy...

Comments

[meiczyslaw.livejournal.com]

The evolutionarily stable (mostly) mix is that most people are cooperatively social, but a few sociopaths exploit the system.

Much of the current research reinforces this notion. Humans tend to generate a natural high when they help other people.

There are a couple of exceptions: for one, humans apparently really like vengence. We're willing to suffer a lot to get back at someone we think deserves it.

[jducoeur]

Well, it's a bit ambiguous whether that's an exception or not. The vengeance thing isn't necessarily helping other individuals, but it appears to be at least partly motivated by a desire to protect the tribe as a whole, by discouraging harm to it. (At least, that's the most plausible evolutionary-biology explanation I've seen.)

So it's arguably still altruistic, just in different ways...