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Bloomberg - Gold fell for the fourth straight session after the U.S. agreed to spend $250 billion to rescue ailing banks. Silver climbed.

Stocks in Europe and Asia rose for a second day after Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson announced plans to buy stakes in financial firms to ease the lending crisis. Gold fell 1.9 percent yesterday as the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index soared 12 percent.

“The equity markets have come back, so you’ll see some of the capital that was flowing into gold just a week ago go to equities,” said Frank Lesh, a trader at FuturePath Trading LLC in Chicago.

Gold futures for December delivery dropped $3, or 0.4 percent, to $839.50 an ounce on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange. The price declined $64 in the previous three sessions.

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BusinessWeek - Platinum and palladium prices rose Thursday alongside gold prices, though the gains were dampened somewhat by falling oil prices and a stronger dollar.

Precious metals are often bought to hedge against a weakening dollar.

Platinum futures for October delivery rose $43.50 to settle at $1,484.20 an ounce on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Palladium futures for December delivery rose $6.50 to settle at $296.10 an ounce.

A note from a UBS analyst encouraging investors to buy gold boosted precious metals.

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Tacoma News Tribune - Changes in winning and losing investments have come so swiftly of late that you might not have realized your favorite approach has backfired lately.

International funds – the hot funds of the last few years – have turned more disappointing than U.S. stock funds. Gold has lost its luster or, more precisely, more than $200 since reaching more than $1,000 an ounce a few months ago. Oil is in a bear market – a decline of 20 percent or more. Small-cap funds, which typically would be shunned during rough economic times, have been on a roll.

The last few weeks have shown why financial planners try to discourage clients from loading up on a few winners while discarding everything else. They know that changes in cycles can come quickly, and without warning, turning winners into losers and vice versa.

Many analysts are confessing their surprise at the twists of the last few weeks. It now appears that the globe is not immune from U.S. economic problems, although that was a favorite theory until a couple of months ago.

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