With the stock market in disarray, gold prices are pushing their way back toward $900 an ounce. Demand for the traditional safe haven is so strong that investors have depleted the U.S. Mint's inventory of various gold bullion coins.

Given this rush into gold, we ran screens to find good gold-focused mutual funds and exchange-traded funds. While comparing the two types of funds isn't apples-to-apples, ETFs seemed to trump mutual funds hands down in terms of cost and performance. (See chart below.) On average, mutual funds specializing in precious metals are down 34% year to date, according to Morningstar. That's no better than the Dow. The two most popular gold-oriented ETFs, iShares COMEX Gold (IAU) and SPDR Gold Shares (GLD), are up about 8% apiece so far in 2008.

The reason for this performance disparity boils down to what the funds actually own. The gold ETFs hold the hard asset itself, whereas the mutual funds generally invest in the stocks of gold producers like Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold (FCX), Newmont Mining (NEM) and Barrick Gold (ABX) . So while the ETFs tend to move in unison with the price of gold, the net asset values of the mutual funds can decline even as gold prices spike. Gold miners haven't been spared by the global selloff in equities. Gold and other commodity ETFs do carry some additional tax risks, which we touched on in an earlier story.

While all gold-oriented mutual funds have suffered this year, the worst we came across were two share classes of a leveraged fund that aims to provide 150% of the performance of the Dow Jones Precious Metals Index. The "investor class" of ProFunds Precious Metals UltraSector (PMPIX) is down 47.4% year to date; the "service class" ( is down 47.8%. They were the only gold-focused funds we found that are lagging by both year-to-date and five-year performance when compared with the average multicap fund.

Gold is worth big bucks for now, but as in crises past it'll probably lose its luster when economic turmoil begins to ease. So as tempting as it may be, we wouldn't recommend putting more than a small percentage of your portfolio in any of these funds.