Gold is an interesting product. You cannot use it for any material purposes other than jewelry but it also is a product that cannot be artificially created. There also is a limited supply of gold. Warren Buffet said it best that you could make a big square cube of gold that would be around 20 football fields tall, wide, and length. That would be a huge cube and that would contain all the gold in the world!
Ben Bernanke has been known to continue to print money. With his latest QE3, he is printing $40 billion a month to keep interest rates low. We are artificially having low interest rates because of the money printing. It will definitely lead to inflation in the future, but we don’t know when. That being the case, gold and silver has continued to rise in price. He has been helping gold and silver continually increase since he took office. I suggest you visit Bullion Vault and you can see today’s current value for gold and silver.
I would recommend looking at a few gold and silver stocks that can have a nice push up if inflation does indeed occur. A favorite of mine, Coeur d’Alene Mines Corporation, is a silver miner stock that is very volatile. It has jumped from $16 to $32 in a matter of months. It also dropped from $32 to $25 in a couple days after the election. If you need more diversification, you should look at Market Vectors Gold Miners ETF (GDX). This ETF holds lots of gold and silver stocks and it should take away lots of that volatility you normally see in the commodity stock market.