Gold run-up coming?

Calendars are good things to have. I need the reminders that mine conveys to me.

Looking at it this morning I wonder what July and August will bring to the gold market.

Last year those two months turned out to be hotter than a pistol. By the time August was nearly at its end, gold was setting its most recent all-time record price up around $1,900.

Can it do it again?

From my perspective as a newspaper editor, it is always a good thing to see records set because that provides the fodder for the next headline.

However, as a long-term collector knows, you would not likely buy expensive gold if you believed it was about to plunge in value. You would wait.

If you thought gold was going to rise dramatically, you would want to buy as much as you could as quickly as possible.

Neither of these scenarios is conducive to being a collector. Collecting by its nature is adding to a set a little at a time over a prolonged period of time, often many years.

It is necessary that you be willing to act when you find the right coin for your set and not base your judgment on the fluctuation of the gold market.

This is where the collector impulse and the investor impulse cancel each other out rather than augment each other.

It would be far better if gold would gently rise predictably year by year. That takes the dramatic headlines of $2,000 or $10,000 bullion off the table, but it would put collecting right back in the center of the gold market again.

Is that likely to happen?

I can dream, can’t I?

Buzz blogger Dave Harper is editor of the weekly newspaper "Numismatic News."