Your advice about creating an asset allocation plan before buying mutual funds and to "always read the prospectus" are excelllent points. But it would seem--that without owning PRPFX and possibly not reading its prospectus --you wrote "The chart of PRPFX might mislead some people." The link below leads to a table of Permanent Portfolio's annual returns since inception in December 1982. You (and Oildog) appear to assume that all investors will hold PRPFX permanently, when possibly some may treat it as a repository of relative safety in a bear market stoked by deteriorating economic fundamentals and geopolitical concerns.

http://www.permanentportfoliofunds.com/pdfs/2007%20PPF%20Annual%20Returns.pdf