It’s strange to already be thinking of 2010 as last year.

However, “last year” I decided to make an honest comparison of gold and silver as investments by comparing them with popular shares.

Admittedly my reason for choosing these particular shares was very unscientific and the accuracy could also be suspect as I relied on information from Google Shares website. I chose:

British Airways (BA) being a high profile very respected and flagship British Company (2,809 shares);
Apple Macintosh, seeing as we all use Macs here (121 shares);
Barclays Bank who we unfortunately bank with (2,454 shares);
Aviva, formerly Norwich Union and one of the biggest employers in Norwich where our offices are based (1,053 shares);
Google being the most high profile and successful of the dot.com companies in an internet dominated decade (160 shares); and of course
Gold (58 troy ounces) and
Silver (3,204 troy ounces).

I based the study on what £10,000 would have bought on the 4th April 2000 (my birthday), and then what those same shares were worth on the same date in 2005 and then again in 2010.
We were firstly very surprised to see that British Airways shares had consistently lost value and ended up worth less than £7,000. Apple Macintosh had initially lost value but ipods, iphone and the like have helped to make those shares worth close to £19,000 so not bad.

Like BA, Barclays shares had also dropped (to around £9,000). Aviva fared even worse with their £10,000 investment now worth only slightly over £4,000, a drop of around 60%.
By comparison gold had risen over 43% to a vale of £43,211 and silver had risen similarly to nearly £38,000. Both only being outdone by Google at £60,000.

Let’s be honest, the chances of finding another Google are slim to say the least. In fact the Google figures were only from the time of the floatation in 2004 so the "bubble" effect is probably only now levelling off and I expect the share price to fall significantly in the 1-3 years, whereas despite any short term dips the price of gold and silver must inevitably rise as paper monies everywhere collapse.