How can I use my ISA to invest in Silver, Gold, Oil etc

thor

jamesd wrote: »

The difficulty is that the best area to be invested in varies with economic cycles that tend to be five to ten years long. We're in the late middle or so of the part of initial economic recovery where natural resources funds do well.

If you really don't want to be looking at it even once a year, pick a fund like Aberdeen Emerging Markets if you're content to look at a twenty year timeframe. That'll still drop 70% during a bad time but it won't have quite such a high risk combination as pure natural resources.

If you don't like a 70% drop in a bad year, pick something safer, like a global tracker fund, say the HSBC World institutional fund bought via Hargreaves Lansdown. It'll go up and down less, less long term growth but "only" a 50% drop in a bad year.

If you don't want a 50% drop then you should consider adding some commercial property and perhaps bond funds to reduce the variation.

An interesting read but it all relies on everything happening in cycles. This may well occur but there is no reason for it to continue either. For example the Stocks and Shares indices are still well below where they were over a decade ago and there is no built in mechanism to bring them back so they could stay there for the next hundred years. At the end of the day it is just a gamble.