It happens over and over and over and over and ....

The gold scammers are at it again. Every couple years, some other NON-PRODUCING asset "investment" is brought out by the scammers. Some prior big losers were:

gold
silver
investment grade diamonds
investment grade rare coins
investment grade wine (really stupid)
investment grade rarestamps
investment grade collectables, including such garbage as
investment grade baseball cards
investment grade political buttons
investment grade toys
investment grade comic books
investment grade dishes
investment grade antiques

Need I go on?

One obvious flag is that phrase "investment grade" which invaribly means a scam.

What happens is that the scammers notice that the price of something has gone up in the past year. They immediately go to work touting the stuff as the "new gold" etc. When the suckers start writing in, the scammers sell them the stuff and steadily increasing prices. This continues for a while until the bubble bursts; that is, a large number of suckers decide it is time to cash in. Then the price drops to pre-scam levels and stays there for decades -- until the next cycle of that particular ripoff.