The WSJ has an interesting report on Ron Paul's financial disclosure:
According to data available through his 2010 “Form A” financial disclosure statement, filed last May, Rep. Paul’s portfolio is valued between $2.44 million and $5.46 million. (Congressional disclosures are given in ranges, not precise amounts.) ...
... about 21% of Rep. Paul’s holdings are in real estate and roughly 14% in cash. But he owns no bonds or bond funds and has only 0.1% in stock funds. Furthermore, the stock funds that Rep. Paul does own are all “short,” or make bets against, U.S. stocks. ...
The remainder of Rep. Paul’s portfolio – fully 64% of his assets – is entirely in gold and silver mining stocks.
At the asset level, that's a remarkably undiversified portfolio. It's also a remarkably pessimistic portfolio, which seems to assume that the dollar's going to tank and that inflation's going to take off.
Anyway, I wonder what the annual return on his portfolio's been. If memory serves, stocks have outperformed gold over the last 80 or so years, but gold's at least matched stocks over the last ten years (depending on whether one includes dividend yield as well as stock price appreciation). So he might have done okay, especially because his buy and hold strategy would have avoided a lot of transaction fees that erode the return of more frequent traders.
