What the experts say

When it pays to splurge

Shelling out close to $500 for one lousy share of Google may seem ridiculous, but a few high-priced stocks are worth every dollar, said John Wasik in Kiplinger’s Personal Finance. In 1990, for instance, you would have paid an “outlandish” $5,900 for a single share in Berkshire Hathaway. “Today, the stock goes for $109,000, a nearly 20-fold increase.” Don’t get too hung up on absolute numbers, since share prices are influenced by “several factors,” including both the firm’s initial public offering price and its “attitude toward stock splits.” What really matters is a company’s price relative to earnings, revenue, or book value. Google, for instance, has a price-to-earnings ratio of just 17—“a level that would have seemed unimaginable just a few years ago,” when its stock traded for more than 40 times earnings.

Like gold? Try platinum

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Stock market volatility and European debt woes have been a boon for gold, which “thrives when investors are fearful,” said Rob Silverblatt in U.S. News & World Report. The “quintessential safe-haven play” recently fetched more than $1,200 an ounce. Yet gold is “hardly the only precious metal out there.” Platinum and palladium are two others whose prices generally move in the same direction as gold. Both have industrial applications, so their prices are influenced by the wider economy—but that’s not a bad thing. Indeed, the fact that these metals “diverge” from gold during extreme market conditions is all the more reason for gold investors to hold them.

Bullish on organic vegetables

Sales of designer clothes and luxury food items have made a comeback, said Daniel Gross in Slate.com. Whole Foods recently announced its best quarterly result in “several years,” Tiffany & Co. reported a 22 percent increase in global sales for the first quarter, and the number of luxury homes sold in San Francisco and New York surpassed that of 2005. Don’t consider the economy cured quite yet, though. The affluent “may have emerged from their stunned, locked-down stupor,” but it will take at least another year of “solid growth, market gains, and healthy bonuses” before well-to-do (and wannabe) consumers start regularly blowing “$130 on organic vegetables or $475 on a pair of shoes.”