Gold and cocoa were higher, while silver, wheat, cotton and copper were lower again on the day.
But despite the yellow metal's sometimes mythic appeal — well documented in Peter L. Bernstein's classic, "The Power of Gold," which recounts the Ruskin parable — it is in many ways now just another commodity, like oil, silver, wheat or pork bellies, subject to the vagaries of the markets and, recently, to an extraordinary level of volatility.
There are markets in both New York and London for numerous primary goods, including cotton, copper, cocoa, sugar, rubber, coffee, wool and wooltops, tin, silver, and wheat.
Silver, copper, wheat and oil have also gained amid concern that new efforts to spur growth — including the $600 billion in new Treasury bond purchases announced by the Federal Reserve on Wednesday — could eventually ignite inflation.
Color Options: platinum gray, reflex silver, black, wheat beige, campanella white, blue graphite.
The fund tracks commodities like oil, gasoline, natural gas, gold, aluminum, silver, copper, corn, wheat, soybeans and sugar.
Machine Zone can mint those rewards — virtual silver, logs, ore, wheat and the like — with impunity, and players freely and eagerly provide their labor for them.
For example, Calpers, the California Public Employees Retirement Systemm, the largest United States pension fund, said last week that it might increase its commodities investments sixteenfold to $7.2 billion through 2010, to benefit from an across-the-board surge in commodities like gold, silver, oil and wheat.
This essentially makes natural gas into a tradeable commodity, very much in the same way as wheat, silver and frozen pork bellies.
With titles like "2.21.98 4:46 P.M.," and a fixed vantage point, Mr. Misrach follows changes only in the sky, the water and the colors, from lowery clouds that reach down to smother the rocks to blank slates of sky, from gunmetal and silver to pale wheat-colored and gray.
Sometimes, the method makes for better madness: "Thetis wrote a treatise noting wheat is silver like the sea".
