What are the best speculations and investments among metals, miners, and other resource plays? To find out, I turned to 20 of the nation's leading newsletter editors, as well as speakers from the recent New Orleans Conference, a leading forum for resource advisors.

Their current top ideas cover a wide diversity of ideas, from gold and silver, from alumina and copper, to platinum and palladium. These picks cover markets from Chile to China and from Canada to Russia. These ideas also range from large cap, well-established, and diversified companies to small cap, development-stage junior speculations.

Readers should only consider these ideas as a starting place for their own research and should keep in mind the caveat that any stock you buy should only be considered within the framework of your own time horizon and risk parameters. Meanwhile, here are 20 different advisors assessing various aspects of the metals, mining, and resources sectors:

Ken Kam is a longtime mutual fund manager who came up with an innovative way to manage money about five years ago. He created the site Marketocracy.com, an online community where investors are invited to join and create portfolios, which are tracked publicly. He then takes the picks of the top 100 performers and sticks them in the mutual fund he manages (this is simplifying a bit, but you get the idea).

The Marketocracy Masters 100 Fund (MOFQX) has outperformed the S&P 500 the past two years, but did pretty poorly in 2004. Morningstar gives it just one star, but Kam is looking forward to its five-year anniversary when he says its returns will be more than double the S&P 500 over that time.

What I find fascinating about Kam's business model is that the community at Marketocracy has become Kam's own research pool. When he has an idea, he tests it against members. When he's looking for new ideas, he checks to see what the top-performing managers on the site are buying. (Premium members get to do the same thing).

This year Kam started his Best Ideas Blog. There he posts about companies he considers, well, his best ideas. His site charges subscription fees for full access to newsletters, forums and the blog. But he shared some of his ideas during a recent visit to AOL's offices.