Twenty years on and 2,603% up from its start date; Blackrock ML Gold and General Fund has every reason to celebrate. Nor is there any sight of an end to good times for gold and hopefully the fund yet. According to the London fund manager, Graham Birch, the fundamentals are just “too compelling”.

The global wise men of asset prices and capital flows have weighed in on Aussie house prices. They have been found overvalued. Crikey. Hey, you can’t say we’re being knee-jerk bears on this one.

Editor’s Note: There are a few different ways to invest in gold these days. You can simply hold the metal itself, or you can invest in gold shares.

I’ve just come back from one of the most important mining conferences of the year, the PDAC (Prospectors and Developers Conference of Canada) conference, in Toronto. A very interesting thing was the number of Chinese delegates.

Regional myopia is a widespread failing. Say “ Mexico” in Europe and the word game usually brings up “holidays”. The other side of the Atlantic it would probably be “cheap labour”.

“Isabel, just look at the rand. It used to be pretty well pegged against the Australian dollar but that is history. It has lost 12% against the US dollar this year.

Speculators are bidding up gold prices to ever new records. Moved by two principal drivers, a weak U.S. dollar, and record crude oil prices, prices now are within striking distance of the $1,000 an ounce level.

Both of the key precious metals have mounted a grand assault on significant numbers this week.

Copper has done the impossible this week. For all practical purposes, the red metal is trading at an all-time high.

After copper suffered a decline in late 2006, the bull case for base metals was in serious jeopardy. The argument says a slowing economy weakens demand for basic materials like copper, tin, nickel, zinc, and lead. Copper also enjoyed a huge 400% run in the previous three years… So bears came out of the woodwork to predict a copper crash.

Here is an optimist! This time the cheerful fellow is not even in the industry. He is a broker. And he thinks that 2008 will be another boom year for bids and deals despite the credit crunch.

It’s unusual for brokers to be so bullish. Especially analysts. They are renowned in the industry for being pessimistic, especially about prices. It has been the mining companies themselves who have been so confident that we’re still in a major revaluation cycle.