"A bar of gold earns no interest, can't be put to any use (apart from jewellery) and is backed by no-one. Why anyone would want to hold physical gold (except for aesthetics) is beyond me."

I'm not a gold bug who thinks that gold IS money, but there are enough people out there who think that it is that anyone who has invested in gold has an asset that is worth more now than ever. Certainly better than KXL stock. Even if you take inflation into account, there's maybe one year in the last 50 where it would not have been a smart idea to buy and hold gold. And if you take inflation into account, gold has outperformed the stock market, hands down. As with stocks, it's not what you think it's worth, it's what the market thinks it's worth.

There are stocks out there that will ouperform gold, and if I knew which ones they were I wouldn't think that holding at least a small amount would be advisable. But since I don't know which stocks will outperform gold (and KXL is a shining example of that), then maybe holding at least some is a reasonable idea.