gold, page-49418

I really don’t see...or maybe agree with your point. The Indexes are based on the market caps of the individual stocks, with rebalances every so often (3 months for ASX from memory). So, don’t see how you can argue the stocks in the Index are ‘hand picked’.
Gold is Gold as you say, but why shouldn’t the performance of Gold be compared to (say) the S&P 500 ETF?