As an active trader, I suggest that given the extreme volatility in the markets today, and the worsening economic conditions, it is damn risky to play long term “buy and hold” at this time. Time and time again, I’ve seen stocks get hammered overnight because some talking head idiot ran off at the mouth in front of a camera. At this point, I rarely hold overnight, preferring to be in cash at days end. No one knows when the bottom will drop out of this current bear rally — if you’re holding when (not if) the freefall happens, you’re dead meat. If trading’s not your thing, than physical gold and maybe silver is where it’s at for the time being. Look at the gold charts over the last 5 years and you’ll see why.
Trouble is getting delivery on physical metal for anything near London spot -- so much downward manipulation out there that, last fall, people like Blanchard were getting $100 over spot for timely deliveries of gold. The pecking order is physical (not quoted), then spot, then ETF "paper gold" (badly manipulated by the Fed, don't touch it).
Another possibility is closed-ends like CEF (Central Fund of Canada), but closed-end managers like to dilute you with "rights offerings". You have to step up and participate 100% in the offering, in order to avoid getting diluted. Last summer CEF suddenly announced a huge rights offering which would be done in tranches. The shares dropped by a third overnight. It's management's way of squeezing shareholders. Robert Scott used to follow closed-ends, wrote a book and a newsletter, but eventually the endless rounds of rights offerings spoiled investor interest in the funds, and he went off and started doing discount brokering.
Mining shares got crushed last July when Bernanke and Hank the Shank walked into the commodities space at the President's behest and cut the elevator cable. (They did a "long squeeze" similar to what the Fed and CFTC did on the Hunt brothers back in 1980, to crush commodities prices and punish the dollar bears.) That started a deluge of margin calls that the hedgies had to meet, and they wound up throwing even their best mining shares out the window to meet their calls .... then after Lehman Brothers finally went broke (partly as a result of the squeeze), everybody got an extra dose, and most mining shares and mutual funds ended up down 70% from the previous May -- an absolute disaster. Punishment for disobeying Ben and Hank's preference that everyone stay in dollars as future bagholders. And the President's preference for lower gasoline prices.