re: Just dumped some cash and bought gold, good or bad?

I agree the numbers seem absurd, BUT

Future value of $1.00 in 200 years at 7% is $752,931. Siegal says stocks have returned 6.5-7% after inflation since 1802. So I know his number here is correct.

I don't know how he figured bonds, bills, but link to the book is here.

There are a number of commentaries on the book and here is a pretty good one.

In a chart, you can see the value of $1.00 in 1802 is only .07 today due to inflation meaning the increase in the dollar value of gold over time has basically only kept up with inflation.

Now I'm sure there are all sorts of issues which would have to be dealt with to really understand relevance of these numbers, such as the complete lack of inflation for the 1st 150 years in the test period to constant inflation the last 50 years, but I firmly believe that bond, bills, and gold (and non-income producing land for that matter) are exceptionally poor investments over time and every study I've looked at confirms this.

One can cherry pick many, many segments of the timeline to prove what they like of course, but I'm pretty sure the reality is that commodities cannot come close to keeping pace with stocks over the long term in producing investor returns.