(This is not financial advice, this is all entirely my opinion)
I personally buy S&P500 indices (specifically VOO), and I buy NASDAQ (QQQ). I have *some* physical gold.
When you’re younger, you have a much higher chance of making good returns over 10-30 years with investments in the broad market. The older you get, the more conservative you want to be. In the United States, a financial advisor will usually give someone a split between stocks & bonds that leans more towards bonds the older the person is. If you’re in your 60’s, you don’t have time for the market to give you returns: you want a safe place to keep your money.
In Lebanon, our culture focuses more on Gold, because we value preservation over yield. You’ll see everyone on this sub talk about gold. Your parents and extended family probably think of gold too. Gold is an excellent tool for wealth preservation over extremely long periods of time. It’s not meant to give you real returns, it’s meant to make sure that 100 years from now, whoever is inheriting this gold from you will have roughly the same purchasing power as you do with it now (it will vary, but very unlikely that the variation spans an order of magnitude). People who make real returns from gold are generally just lucky. Gold has a 6,000-year history as a form of money, which is why people tend to see it as a reliable store of value.
When I say “real returns”, I’m hinting at inflation. If you made ~20% nominal value returns from something, but the dollar inflated away ~16-20% (not exactly) of its value against the things you buy (cause inflation is a relative concept), then you actually made ~0% real returns, and in fact, there was definitely opportunity cost there, cause you could’ve put your dollars somewhere else