I remember when I first started investing in stocks and bought some gold and silver-- the experts were saying to look at the "ratios" of certain investments to determine how healthy those investments were.

The big "ratio" for stocks was the price to earnings ratio.

Then you looked at the ratio of the stock's price to dividends to determine the "yield" or return.

For gold there was the gold to silver ratio. I talk about that on our "Gold and Silver" page at http://alanbestbuys.com/id82.html .

But do we care about ratios anymore? Do we even follow them?

Some of the biggest and best stock market performers are companies that don't pay dividends, and some of these high flying stocks have no earnings.

The gold to silver ratio says that the price of gold is out of this world or that the price of silver is deeply depressed.

Do you even think about ratios anymore? Do brokers even talk about them?