By Geena Paul
MUMBAI (Commodity Online): What is in gold? For some people in 2009 everything depended on gold and for some it was just some glittering metal for making jewellery only.

Gold is just a chemical element with the symbol Au (Latin: aurum) and an atomic number of 79. It has been a highly sought-after precious metal for coinage, jewelry, and other arts since the beginning of recorded history. A total of 161,000 tonnes of gold have been mined in human history, as of 2009. Modern industrial uses include dentistry and electronics, where gold has traditionally found use because of its good resistance to oxidative corrosion and excellent quality as a conductor of electricity. But, it is  not as useful as even silver or other metals like copper and steel. So why the craze for gold.

Then some people say it is money and safety which attracts people to gold. Then you can easily dump gold in 2010. There are better ways and better metals to cash in on.

Take the case of silver. Silver has performed better than gold in 2009 and in the coming year you can trust platinum for making better profits than gold. Platinum is all set to soar in 2010 riding on the auto sector demand.

Forget metals, you can make better profits in other commodities like garlic and turmeric if you invest properly. Turmeric farmers never had it as good as demand galloped even after prices doubled in a span of 10 months. In some cases the prices climbed almost 300% in one year.  Spot prices at the terminal market of Erode and Nizamabad even touched Rs 135 per kg during November as reports of low physical stocks and damage to the new crop scared traders. Farmers and traders who held on to their stocks had an excellent year after prices rallied following heavy rains in October.

Garlic prices have jumped so high in China that the crop has outperformed gold and stocks to be the country’s best performing asset this year. As H1N1 swine flu continues to worry China’s leaders — who are rolling out a nationwide vaccine program — its people seek a more traditional remedy. Just as some Chinese turned to turnips to prevent the SARS virus in 2003, garlic has emerged as a swine flu fighter in 2009.

Garlic prices have leapt from just five cents a pound in February to almost 55 cents. Same is the case in India also. Garlic prices have soared to new heights across the globe. The Chinese price hike has been a boon to US garlic producers.

And if you take other qualities of these commodities and compare it with gold, the yellow metal has nothing much to boast of. Chemically, gold is a transition metal and can form trivalent and univalent cations in solutions. Compared with other metals, pure gold is more chemically unreactive.

Because of the softness of pure (24k) gold, it is usually alloyed with base metals for use in jewelry, altering its hardness and ductility, melting point, color and other properties.
Alloys with lower caratage, typically 22k, 18k, 14k or 10k, contain higher percentages of copper, or other base metals or silver or palladium in the alloy. Copper is the most commonly used base metal, yielding a redder color.

In medieval times, gold was often seen as beneficial for the health, in the belief that something that rare and beautiful could not be anything but healthy. Even some modern esotericists and forms of alternative medicine assign metallic gold a healing power.

In modern times, injectable gold has been proven to help to reduce the pain and swelling of rheumatoid arthritis and tuberculosis. Gold alloys are used in restorative dentistry, especially in tooth restorations, such as crowns and permanent bridges.

Gold, or alloys of gold and palladium, are applied as conductive coating to biological specimens and other non-conducting materials such as plastics and glass to be viewed in a scanning electron microscope.

So, why put your money in gold in the New Year instead of booking better profits by investing in other options. In 2010, gold is surely not going to get the safe haven charm because the beginning of the new decade is supposed to be a boom year. Durign boom time, gold hardly gives you any god returns. So you can safely dump gold in 2010 and go for even silver or platinum. Happy New Year!

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