Oooh, shiny.

(Brought to you by the Gold Coins Gain.)

I've never really known much about gold and how much it's worth--except for that one embarrassing time when I had to take all my jewelry to a pawn shop to pay my rent, and that's hardly a reliable market reference. I have some gold jewelry, and it's sure pretty and all, buy I never thought of it before as in investment strategy. I've certainly never sat down and thought, "Hey! I want to buy gold coin!" The only thing that springs to mind when I hear "gold bullion" is pirate movies.

Apparently, though, there's quite an investment market in gold. People buy gold bullion as part of a "precious metals IRA" retirement fund, which never would've occurred to me. I know theoretically that there's a certain amount of gold in Fort Knox for every dollar in circulation, but I thought that was just a sort of archaic method. I didn't realize that people actually buy bullion for investment purposes. Similarly, I know people collect coins, but I didn't know you could just purchase gold bullion coins like a 24K American buffalo coin--not necessarily for collecting, but because gold value has apparently been steadily increasing.

I guess you learn something new every day.