I’ve never heard of David Skarica before, but I’ve been seeing a lot of ads for his stuff lately — he runs a newsletter called Gold Stock Adviser, and like so many others, he predicts that the bulge in US Government spending and borrowing makes inflation inevitable … and that the “gold rush is just getting started!”

That may or may not be true (remember, many people believe that real inflation of the money supply requires private lending as much as it requires government money-creation), but it’s certainly true that gold is a reasonable bulwark for any portfolio — and you can make a case for gold as a unique “bulwark” investment in any kind of environment, including deflation, due to its historical psychological primacy among us human beings as a “store of value.”

I’d hesitate to be nearly as aggressive about inflation (or gold) as those folks who are betting on hyperinflation with their entire portfolios, going short treasury bonds and long gold, energy and commodities … but I do have probably 25% of my portfolio in a combination of all of those things, with maybe half of that amount in gold and silver, and in the miners thereof.

But Skarica does tease a few specific investments for us, one or two of which I’ve written about before but most of which are new to these pages. So I thought I’d try to give the Irregulars the first crack at them today. He lists five “Gold Stock Opportunity” investments, let’s have a gander.

The first one he actually names — Agnico-Eagle, which trades at a nice premium price today in part because it had great timing, they ramped up production and became a big miner just as the gold rally really caught a head of steam, so there are a lot of folks who love this one.

And the second one is more or less a “gimme,” too — he teases that he has a favorite gold exchange traded fund, but it’s one that holds a basket of miners, not the bullion. If that’s not the Van Eck Market Vectors Gold Miners ETF (GDX), it’s something else that’s going to pretty much exactly track with GDX. GDX actually has 31 components currently, but it certainly holds all the ones most investors have heard of, like Kinross, Agnico-Eagle, Goldfields, Yamana, etc. And it’s got fine volume ...