The World's Largest Gold Coin...

Almost 500 pounds of it!  And you can have your very own for roughly $5 million (depending on the current price of gold, naturally)...

The Golden Dow...

Normally you see the Dow Jones Industrial Average (aka DJIA; a meaure of the overall prices on the stock market) as it is computed in dollars.

The chart at right shows a rather different view: the DJIA computed in gold.  The shape of this line is very different than that of the DJIA in dollars.

So what can we glean from this?  I can think of two things.  First, it looks as though historically a leap in the gold-denominated price of the DJIA serves as a “bubble” warning.  Second, there's clearly an arbitrage opportunity between gold, stocks, and dollars if you can get the timing right (and gold bugs have been saying this forever).

But it's a darned weird (and to me unexpected) result...