关于黄金作为投资物-en
I’m writing this to digest what I’ve read and put it in my own words—for my own learning only.
First, Buffett:
I’ve never wanted to swap my stocks for gold. I’d rather bet on great businesses and trust that their intrinsic value will grow steadily. They’re run by strong managers and sell things people love today and will love tomorrow. Compared with digging metal out of the ground in South Africa, shipping and insuring it, and locking it in Fort Knox, people would rather spend their wages on See’s peanut brittle, Coca-Cola, or things like that.
Although my father was keen on the gold standard, I’ve never been excited about gold. I’ve never really owned it, but I grew up in a gold-friendly household—I’ve given it a chance—and I still don’t see what its intrinsic value is. We sell gold items at Borsheim’s, but I would never sell stocks to buy gold. Trading productive assets for non-productive ones feels alien to me.
In past shareholder letters Buffett also wrote:
Besides cash-like assets, there’s another class that’s usually wrong to hold—assets that generate no cash flow and rely on someone paying more later: gold, art, antiques, etc. He calls them non-productive; the opposite is productive assets that throw off cash.
He used gold to illustrate: Roughly 170,000 tons of gold exist worldwide; melted into a cube about 21 meters on a side. Humanity dug it up, refined it, buried it again, and posts guards—it still produces nothing. People buy it hoping more buyers will pay more later.
Gold produces no cash flow and only hopes the next person pays more—it’s non-productive.
Below is Chen Jiahe’s angle:
Gold doesn’t create value. Good stocks compound earnings; a cheap price lets you buy that stream cheaply. Gold doesn’t “grow” because you store it well.
Assets that compound year after year beat zero growth over long horizons—same message as Buffett.
Gold is hard to “trade up” with. With stocks you enjoy fundamentals and can rebalance into better risk/reward names, so your portfolio’s fundamental growth can outpace any single stock. Real estate and collectibles are similar. But all gold is the same—it’s so simple that mispricing is rare, so holders rarely gain extra “fundamental” upside from trading—the very engine value investors rely on.
Gold isn’t great “disaster insurance.” If society collapses to where gold matters, food (cans), medicine, and means of protection bought at today’s prices would beat gold.
I once told Sasa I wanted to buy gold during the pandemic—that idea was wrong. Glad to drop another bad instinct.
Tang Erseng put it bluntly: buying gold is buying peace of mind—emotional value.
Stable chemistry, scarcity, or social consensus alone doesn’t make something “precious.” (I still wonder: all three together—what about crypto? I’m too much of an outsider.)
Buying gold is buying emotional value—call it forced saving if you like.
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