Comment: Gold?

Gold is not an investment. It's a safety precaution. You said you are looking to make money short term, so a long term investment like gold only makes sense in you are simply trying to protect your money until retirement. Plus, gold and silver are too expensive to be considered an investment. If someone had told you to buy .com stocks in the late 90s or an investment home in 2006, each time, you would look at the price and say, "why the hell would I buy something who's value has shot up so high." The old saying is "buy low, sell high", not "buy high, sell high", because that doesn't work, you end up buying high, and losing out. Every time you see a bubble burst and folks lose a buttload of money, there was some financial advisor showing them a chart where prices where going straight up, and he promised that prices would continue to skyrocket. Gold will not continue this path. Even if the economy collapsed and gold became the only form of money, you'd still only have enough to get you by a few months. When you only have 10 grand, gold isn't a short term or long term solution for anything.