Most of the time, we’re no fans of Wall Street analysts. They’re often behind-the curve, biased, and flat out wrong.

The commodity markets are surging today. Are the bulls charging because of investor fear or is something else going on? Here’s the answer.

While I was in Canada last week, Smart Profits readers sure did pound the mailbag! I returned to find several questions to my recent column on how to execute covered call trades. For example, one reader wanted to know how options can work with short positions – and referenced doing so on Yamana Gold (NYSE: AUY).

Last week, I explained the nuts and bolts of covered call investing – a bullish strategy that focuses more on returns than it does on risk.

The resource rich Canadian markets took a breather during mid-week trading. For the tale of the tape, the TSX Exchange added a modest 0.48%, while the TSX Gold Index lost another 0.5% and the TSX Venture Exchange, Canada’s largest junior exploration bourse, gave back 0.14% with the decliners edging out the advancers by a 433 to 425 margin on a robust 225 million shares traded.

While gold had a big run-up in price during the three-month stretch that ended in late February, the yellow metal has subsequently dropped back a bit, as have the prices of the leading mining shares. If anything, however, the reasons for gold bullishness have intensified.

Karim Rahemtulla from the Smart Profits Report says that putting your money in gold mining companies will help you milk your investments, not physical gold.

With food prices on the rise, the price of gold will drive. Martin Hutchinson of Money Morning says, “As gold goes up, it gets more popular and investors start piling into it…” Here are five ways to play bottom-basement gold.

I dropped in on the Cambridge House gold show in Vancouver this weekend. It was busy. People were generally upbeat and felt smart about the bargains they loaded up on during the recent rout. It was then that I realized that one gold ratio would lead to lower gold bullion prices while leading gold shares higher.

Yesterday in the UK publication, Metro,  Jim Rogers advised investors to move to China if they spoke Chinese. Today, I have my own piece of cultural advice: Tell your children to take French and German in school. And while you’re at it, grab your own Rosetta Stone guide to foreign languages… You might need it sooner than you think.