In December 1974, gold looked finished. The price had run from $35 an ounce to nearly $195 in four years, and then it came apart. Over the next twenty months, gold lost almost half its value, sliding to about $103 by the summer of 1976. Newspapers ran the obituary, investors who had cheered the climb sold near the lows, and Wall Street called the whole thing a bubble that popped. They were early, and they were wrong, because from that 1976 low gold rose more than sevenfold to reach $850 by January 1980. The people who sold to the headlines missed the greatest run the metal has ever had. I keep that story close right ... (full story)