Here are some things I think I am thinking about this weekend. 1) Gold as insurance. I always like it when people say things that I have said in the past. So I was pleasantly surprised to read Greg Ip writing in the WSJ that gold is a form of “insurance”. I’ve always sort of struggled with gold as an asset class. I’ve generally stated that a smallish allocation of about 5% seems about right, but I never had a formal model for justifying that. Until I created the Defined Duration methodology. When I ran the model with gold it was clear that gold operates a lot like an insurance instrument. When weird things happen ... (full story)