This week gold has moved to new all-time highs. I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, it's a great personal vindication, because I've been talking about gold as my "best idea" throughout the entire credit crisis.

It has really turned out to be the best idea, in good times and bad -- at least among risky assets. At the worst of it, gold fell only 28% from its previous highs. But the S&P 500 fell 56.8% -- more than twice as much. Yet from their respective lows through yesterday's close, both have gone up the same amount: 71%.

Gold versus stocks? It's not hard to pick the one you wish you had held through these difficult times. Gold. Went up just as much, but only went down half as much.

And there's one thing you can say about gold that you can't say about anything else. It's at an all-time high. That means that no matter when you bought it, you've got a profit.

Stocks? They've had a heck of a move over the last 15 months, to be sure. But they're still 26% off their all-time highs. And they've barely shown any profit at all over the last decade. Over that long period gold has quadrupled.

Is it time to sell? I must say it's tempting, when gold has come so far while most other assets have struggled so much.

But the time to sell isn't necessarily when an asset is at all-time highs. It's when everyone loves it, and is absolutely convinced it's going higher. That description may fit Apple (AAPL) pretty well, but it sure doesn't fit gold. In the minds of most investors, gold remains a hated asset and those who advocate gold are dismissed as fanatical "gold bugs."

Yes, I know there are informercials about gold on radio and 30-second ads on television. But that doesn't mean gold is as overloved as Apple. Quite the contrary. It means there are a lot of gold-hating investors who are too smart for their own good, and have turned up their noses at the best-performing asset class in the world right now.

And why shouldn't it be the best performing? Throughout history, gold has been money. Today it's a monetary underground railroad, used by people who want to escape paper money when it's about to be debased by the governments who print too much of it. When the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank create massive amounts of new money to bail out the world banking system, that's debasement on a grand scale. A ticket on the monetary underground railroad gets very expensive -- which is why gold is at all-time highs.

The problem currency right now is the euro. Thanks to the risk of debt default by Greece and other smaller European nations, the ECB has had to commit to so-called "quantitative easing." That means printing money and buying government bonds with it. That's not so unusual on the face of it. Central banks do it all the time -- the Fed certainly does. What's unusual is that the ECB has never done it before, and, in fact, is prohibited by statute from doing it at all. And yet it's going to do it now, statute or no statute.

That's not just printing money and dropping it out of helicopters. That's breaking the law. When a central bank breaks the law, it's a sure sign that the currency they're responsible for is in for some serious debasement.

So euro-based investors have been getting out of paper money and into gold. In fact, they've been doing it for some time. Gold broke to new all-time highs, priced in euros, back in February. But now it's done so in dollars, too. How come, since Europe is in trouble but the United States is doing relatively well?

The reason, I think, is that the European debt crisis has shown that the global credit crunch is still very much alive, and that all the central banks of the world, in one way or another and to differing extents, will have to print a lot more paper money to get us out of it. By the way, gold is at all-time highs now in terms of the British pound, too. And it's at post-1980 highs in terms of the Japanese yen. When it comes to paper currencies now, you can run, but you can't hide.

But seemingly sophisticated investors just don't get it. I knew for sure that gold was going to move to all-time highs this week when, on Monday afternoon, one of those know-it-all loud-mouth market bloggers posted a nasty critique of my column last Friday. I don't want to give him the satisfaction of naming him or linking to him. But I'll quote him saying, "the one man contrary indicator" -- that's me, folks --" announced AFTER the equity market collapse, AFTER a huge spike in gold that it was time to dump stocks, and get long Gold."

Actually, I didn't say it was "time to dump stocks." In reality, I said, "I'm not suggesting you become bearish. I'm just suggesting you become cautious." And I didn't "announce" it "AFTER the equity market collapse" of last week. I've been cautious about stocks all year. In fact, in the column, I chided myself for being too early on that call. But when it comes to bloggers like this, facts just confuse them, so

And as to gold, what do I need to say? It's moved to all-time highs since my "announcement" Friday. Anybody got a problem with that? Well, I can think of one blogger who does, because by so arrogantly mocking my call to buy gold, he was implicitly recommending that you sell gold. After all, in his opinion, I'm "the one man contrary indicator." Very bad call. And just plain mean, too.

We market commentators make lots of mistakes. It goes with the territory. And there are so many of us making so many different mistakes at any point in time, there's always someone who looks like a fool. So I don't think there is such thing as a "one man contrary indicator." The blogger who was so nasty to me has made plenty of whopper bad calls, and some good ones, too. As have I.

But I've found there is one clue that you can use to tell which market commentators are likely to end up being "the one man contrary indicator" du jour. It's arrogance. Any time a market commentator tries to make himself seem smart and everyone else seem stupid, you can be pretty sure the market gods will punish him for his hubris.

That's what my blogging nemesis has done, and it makes me very confident that gold is moving higher. But it's not really because I assign this little man's particular hubris any unique importance. All the critics of gold act the same way. They're all arrogant. To them, "gold bugs" like me are just cultists irrationally devoted to an icon of a bygone age.

How wrong they all are. But so far, even all-time highs haven't convinced them. When they're finally convinced, they'll come barreling into the market, and gold will probably double in a matter of months. That's when I'll sell. But not until then.