It’s fair to say that Warren Buffett has made few quid over the years. He’s done this by following a very simple set of values and sticking to them over a very long time. As a result of his success, his words are often considered wise. Here’s an extract from his 2011 letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders about gold. It’s one I like and I hope you do too…

‘Today the world’s gold stock is about 170,000 metric tons. If all of this gold were melded together, it would form a cube of about 68 feet per side. (Picture it fitting comfortably within a baseball infield.) At $1,750 per ounce – gold’s price as I write this – its value would be $9.6 trillion. Call this cube – pile A.
Let’s now create a pile B costing an equal amount. For that, we could buy all U.S. cropland (400 million acres with output of about $200 billion annually), plus 16 Exxon Mobils (the world’s most profitable company, one earning more than $40 billion annually). After these purchases, we would have about $1 trillion left over for walking-around money (no sense feeling strapped after this buying binge). Can you imagine an investor with $9.6 trillion selecting pile A over pile B?
A century from now the 400 million acres of farmland will have produced staggering amounts of corn, wheat, cotton, and other crops – and will continue to produce that valuable bounty, whatever the currency may be. Exxon Mobil will probably have delivered trillions of dollars in dividends to its owners and will also hold assets worth many more trillions (and, remember, you get 16 Exxons). The 170,000 tons of gold will be unchanged in size and still incapable of producing anything. You can fondle the cube, but it will not respond.’

I love two things about this quote. The first is the mental picture of the cube of gold all shiny and bright inside a baseball infield. The second is the thought of a trillion dollars of ‘small change’ in the pocket. Nice.