Another day, another story on commodities hitting new highs. Yep, oil has done it again today, and so has that most famous metal, gold.

According to a Marketwatch piece, gold has reached a record delivery price of $992 for April delivery (as of this writing). Pretty darn amazing. Of course, the more amazing -- or, perhaps, the more sad -- thing is that I've been ignoring the gold bull run. And I don't feel good about it whatsoever. The problem is, though, that commodity prices can be quite risky, especially for individual investors. Putting money to work in gold at this point could definitely be a gamble, especially as there are other bets out there that might be more worthy in this environment (to me, at least); for example, I am bullish on certain mortgage real estate investment trusts because of the trend of the Fed; I currently own MFA (NYSE: MFA), for example. (Yes, I did end up finding an acceptable entry point.)

Looking at the one-year chart of GLD (NYSE: GLD), the tracking stock for gold value, it is nearly implausible to deny that gold is in a definitive uptrend. And gold-related stocks such as Goldcorp (NYSE: GG) are following the commodity's movement. The old adage about trends being friends rings pretty true here. But, I just don't know if I want to do any inflation-hedging right now, and I don't know if I want to chase gold at these levels. At the very least, I would wait for a pullback to the 50-day moving average before even considering allocating some of the glittery asset to my portfolio. If you are an individual investor and you do decide that you can't take it anymore, that you want in on this ride, certainly make sure that you have enough cash on hand after your first purchase to improve your cost basis if it becomes necessary.

Can you ignore gold anymore? originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Mon, 03 Mar 2008 15:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.