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Gold/Mining/Energy : Strictly: Drilling and oil-field services -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: isopatch who wrote (92411)	7/17/2001 12:03:55 PM
From: Frank Pembleton	Respond to of 95453

Signs of life By Cdn Mutual Fund Adviser A modest position in a well-managed precious-metals fund may make sense now, for two reasons. First, the risk is low, the sector having been out of favor for several years. And second, the usurper of the claim to being the world's most reliable money, the U.S. greenback, may be running out of steam. Signs abound that gold bullion, and hence the shares of companies that explore for, find and produce the metal, may be coming back to life. The most-obvious sign of all, of course, is steadiness in the price of gold bullion. Since the beginning of the year, the metal has held steady near $265 U.S, possibly putting a base under declines lasting more than 20 years. Gold has little inherent value. Its main use is jewellery. But human civilization has used gold as money for most of recorded history. And many believe even now that gold has the necessary quality of scarcity to make it the only reliable form of money. Some, however, now feel the U.S. through its dollar has at last solved the problem of creating and controlling a form of money that works. Others suggest the value of the dollar in terms of most other currencies in the world has entered a bubble. International investors seem to want to own the U.S. dollar, or securities so-denominated, without question. Purchasing power, one of the main uses of any money, be damned. National indebtedness? Who cares. And as a stable storeplace of value, the U.S. buck seems to have the confidence of everyone. But that kind of momentum, self-fulfilling for a while, characterises bubbles. And bubbles can go on for a long time. Should investors around the world lose faith in the U.S. dollar, however, where would they turn to store value between real-economy transactions? The euro? The Chinese yuan? or even the Japanese yen? Nothing suggests these other man-made forms of money would be any better than the U.S. dollar. Could gold, then, take over as a money of last resort? We think it possible. After all, that's exactly what it's been for five millenia. So a portfolio of gold companies, large and small, producers, developers and explorers, makes sense now as a low-risk speculation on the future of gold. Our choice for precious-metals mutual fund has always been Dynamic Precious Metals Fund. This fund has a long record of success investing in gold companies, mainly in Canada. Much of that is due to the strong presence of Dynamic founder Ned Goodman, a gold promoter from way back.