Tracking Gold and Silver (or any other commodity investment) in Quicken 2010?
"You don't need to use a real stock like GLD.  You can just create a ""stock"" called something like ""1 oz Gold"" and buy and sell them as if they were shares.  It won't auto-update the price like GLD, but that's not a big deal to update manually once a month or so. I prefer to have accurate data that is correct at a particular point in time to having data that is 2-3% off, or that requires entering the ounces as 10x reality.  YMMV. This is very similar to how you track US Savings Bonds in Quicken (and might be described in the help under that topic.)" I would track it using a regular asset account.  The same way I would track the value of a house, a car, or any other personal asset. ETA: If you want automatic tracking, you could set it up as a stock portfolio holding shares of the GLD ETF.  One share of GLD represents 1/10 ounce of gold.  So, if you have 5 ounces of gold, you would set that up in Quicken as 50 shares of GLD. If you don't need 100% accuracy then GLD and SLV will work fine.   Over the long-term these converge quite nicely with the price of the metal. "I was able to find a fairly decent index that trades very close to 1/10th the actual price of gold by the ounce. The difference may be accounted to the indexes operating cost, as it is very low, about 0.1%. The index is the ETFS Gold Trust index (SGOL). By using the SGOL index, along with a Standard Brokerage investment account, I was able to set up an investment that appropriately tracked my gold ""shares"" as 10x their weight in ounces, the share cost as 1/10th the value of a gold ounce at the time of purchase, and the original cost at time of purchase as the cost basis. There tends to be a 0.1% loss every time I enter a transaction, I'm assuming due to the index value difference against the actual spot value of the price of gold for any day, probably due to their operating costs.  This solution should work pretty well, as this particular index closely follows the gold price, and should reflect an investment in gold over a long term very well. It is not 100% accurate, but it is accurate enough that you don't lose 2-3% every time you enter a new transaction, which would skew long-term results with regular purchases by a fair amount."
"Gold is not an investment.  Gold is a form of money.  It and silver have been used as money much longer than paper.  Paper money is a relatively recent invention (less than 350 years old) with a horrible track record of preserving wealth.  When I exchange my paper US dollars for gold I'm exchanging one form of money for another.  US dollars, or US Federal Reserve Notes to be more precise, can be printed ad nauseam by one bank that is totally private and is never audited.  Keeping all of your savings in US dollars is ignoring history, it is believing the US Federal Reserve has your best interest in mind, it is hoping that somehow things will be different this time, it is believing that the US dollar will somehow magically be the first fiat currency to last a person's lifetime. TIPS may seem like a good hedge against inflation.  However, the government offering TIPS is also the same government that is calculating the inflation rate used to adjust TIPS.  What a great deal.  If you do some research you discover that the method for calculating the consumer price index is always ""modified"" since it is always found to over estimate inflation.  It is never found to under estimate inflation.  Imagine that.  Here is a chart showing the inflation rate as if it were calculated the same way as it was calculated in 1980. Buying any government debt is also a way to guarantee you or your children will be taxed in the future since the government will have to obtain the money from someone to pay back bonds.  It's like voting for future taxes." &gt; and you can't buy anything with them  not true at all.  gold converts to ANY/EVERY currency in the world  look, I don't care what you do.  your question was how to make $500 into more.  my answer is one answer.  but I encourage you to [follow the price of gold and silver](http://www.infomine.com/investment/metal-prices/gold/) from time to time (weekly?) to see the path I predicted  here are two videos to help you learn  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvBCDS-y8vc  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRphHg87uSc "The general argument put forward by gold lovers isn't that you get the same gold per dollar (or dollars per ounce of gold), but that you get the same consumable product per ounce of gold. In other words the claim is that the inflation-adjusted price of gold is more-or-less constant. See zerohedge.com link for a chart of gold in 2010 GBP all the way from 1265. (""In 2010 GBP"" means its an inflation adjusted chart.) As you can see there is plenty of fluctuation in there, but it just so happens that gold is worth about the same now as it was in 1265. See caseyresearch.com link for a series of anecdotes of the buying power of gold and silver going back some 3000 years. What this means to you: If you think the stock market is volatile and want to de-risk your holdings for the next 2 years, gold is just as risky If you want to invest some wealth such that it will be worth more (in real terms) when you take it out in 40 years time than today, the stock market has historically given better returns than gold If you want to put money aside, and it to not lose value, for a few hundred years, then gold might be a sensible place to store your wealth (as per comment from @Michael Kjörling) It might be possible to use gold as a partial hedge against the stock market, as the two supposedly have very low correlation" I think it is because people have realized that the paper gold (and silver) is pretty much worthless, and that gold in hand (physical gold) is where it is at. I do not pretend to be a goldbug speculator. I just know that over selling paper, eventually has to bottom out, once people start to ask for delivery of their assets, and realize they are not going to get anything for their investments. "I used Quicken, so this may or may not be helpful. I have a Cash account that I call ""Temporary Assets and Liabilities"" where I track money that I am owed (or that I owe in some cases).  So if I pay for something that is really not my expense, it is transferred to this account (""transferred"" in Quicken terms).  The payment is then not treated as an expense and the reimbursement is not treated as income--the two transactions just balance out." UNG    United States Natural Gas Fund  Natural Gas USO    United States Oil Fund  West Texas Intermediate Crude Oil UGA    United States Gasoline Fund     Gasoline DBO    PowerShares DB Oil Fund     West Texas Intermediate Crude Oil UHN    United States Heating Oil Fund  Heating Oil I believe these are as close as you'd get. I'd avoid the double return flavors as they do not track well at all.  Update - I understand James' issue. An unmanaged single commodity ETF (for which it's impractical to take delivery and store) is always going to lag the spot price rise over time.   And therefore, the claims of the ETF issuer aside, these products will almost certain fail over time. As shown above, When my underlying asset rises 50%, and I see 24% return, I'm not happy. Gold doesn't have this effect as the ETF GLD just buys gold, you can't really do that with oil. I interned at a wealth management firm that used very active momentum trading, 99% technicals. Strictly ETFs (indexes, currencies, commodities, etc), no individual equities. They'd hold anywhere from 1-4 weeks, then dump it as soon as the chart starts turning over.  As soon as I get enough capital I'm adopting their same exact strategy, it's painfully easy "Because most of the posters have disparaged the pursuit of silver without a reflection upon what you wrote in the question - your concern about Hungary and its government, I'll weigh in it.  In a stable and solid political and economic environment, this advice against silver would be generally correct.  As you commented, though, this has not been the case and thus it is difficult for some to understand this. Given your concerns, here's a question to reflect upon - what can the government of Hungary not confiscate?  Or what have they not confiscated in the past?  If silver is on that list, then very few people here will understand because statements like, To be honest, I think a lot of people on this site are doing you a disservice by taking your idea as seriously as they are, are completely predicated on an environment that has been relatively stable over the years.  I know my fellow Americans (and some Europeans) don't get this, but some countries have seen disasters - for instance, Brazil has been hyperinflation even when interest rates with insane interest rates (over 1000%). So this answer won't be popular, but depending on your environment, silver may be an excellent choice.  If the government of Hungary has confiscated silver in the past (or you suspect they might), though, I'd stay far away from it.  In reading and listening to people in these environments, citizens typically want something the government does want to take inventory of that tend to hold their value or rise during times of crisis.  Most Americans (if they were honest) really can't relate to this and the few that can would agree.  Another popular item to have, which doesn't physically exist, is a rare, but valuable skill that will be needed in a crisis.  For instance, being highly skilled at negotiation and knowing the right people both come in handy at difficult times.  Can you pay for learning or increasing those skill sets now?  Never forget that self-investment can go far. And as a financial note and word of advice from someone who's been a financial adviser for over half a decade, a good financial adviser always seeks to get the person's information before providing advice and almost never says that a particular choice is always bad or always good; I would seldom say that a person should do one thing and it will always be good advice because that may not work in their country/state/environment/situation/etc.  As they say in the SQL Server community - ""it depends"" and that holds true for finance.  In the long run, those items which we may not think of as good investments or stores of value may end up having their day.  To paraphrase Solomon, ""There's a time and place for everything under the sun.""  Even in my short life, I've witnessed a period of gold and silver routing the stock market and the stock market routing gold and silver.  I suspect I'll see both again if I live a few more decades. tl;dr"