What is still considered a safe investment vehicle in today’s market, considering a possible recession?

9 Safe-Haven Investments http://www.businessinsider.com/safe-have%E2%80%A6 Consumer staples stocks like Proctor & Gamble, Coca-Cola and Phillip Morris are typical safe-haven plays. Or you can get a consumer staples ETF like XLP. All of these stocks hung tough as the market melted down, and have outperformed the stock market in the last year or so. That’s because even in tough times, people will keep buying food, soap and cigarettes. Dividend stocks are another safe haven. Other businesses with stable revenue streams also apply – Verizon (NYSE:VZ) and AT&T (NYSE:T) are sleepy telecom stocks that may not ever blow investors away with gains in share prices. But they deliver dividend yields of more than 5%. In a choppy market, a return of 5% is mighty nice. This website gives you other ideas for safe haven plays: http://www.safehaven.com/ If you want to consider lower risk economies as safe havens, Germany has a strong economy based largely on manufacturing, steady growth, and a balance of payments surplus based on the success of its exporting industries. You can buy the bonds directly through a German bank, but the minimum investment is large - about $70,000 (50,000 euros). There is an exchange-traded note (ETN) devoted to bund (German government bond) futures, the Power Shares DB German Bund Futures ETN (NYSE: BUNL). However, that's not the same thing as buying bunds directly; you have a credit risk on its sponsor, Deutsche Bank AG (NYSE: DB), a basis risk between futures and bonds, and a U.S. government credit risk because the ETN invests in futures contracts and U.S. T-bills - getting you right back where you started in terms of credit risk. So, on the whole, you should avoid this. In terms of shares for an individual investor, I'd recommend the iShares MSCI Germany ETF (NYSE: EWG). You might also look at the iShares MSCI Singapore ETF (NYSE: EWS) - that's probably the safest haven of all, since the country has hardly any government bonds outstanding! You seem fairly thorough in your analysis, but let's get down to specifics and define what it is you're trying to do. A "safe haven" essentially is reduced risk, correct? Anything you can think of to reduce risk accomplishes the same goal as looking for safe haven investments, per se. Anything you can put a Stop Loss Order on, like a stock or ETF or even a futures contract, may be less risk than an open-ended long position in say, a low-risk mutual fund that is always "in" the market and gyrates with the ups and downs of the market. Buying gov't bonds that have soared 30% in two months would be a lot riskier than shorting them. Obviously, buying an ETF near some support level, after a pullback, like GLD, is less risky than buying bonds that are near all-time highs. If you can't define your risk, how do you know what it is. Who cares if it has a pretty name like "safe-haven?" Can you define your risk specifically? Shorting the market or a stock may be actual less risk than trying to go long a safe haven investment in a down market. The trend is your friend. Denying this is risky. How will any safe haven play perform in a downturn like 2008 of 6,000 Dow points? Why call it a safe haven at all if you can lose half of your investment? Sounds like a plan to fool yourself, or attempt to ostracize yourself from reality, rather than risk. With a Stop Loss Order in place, subtracting that from your entry price gives you an exact dollar amount of risk. You determine your risk, if you just think about it. That's why we trade trends: it's easy to define stop placement below the trend line, and when the trend is broken, we are automatically taken out with a well-defined risk. Otherwise, we just keep moving our stop up as price respects the Uptrend Line and ride the trend, often with a lower risk than "low-risk" investments. It's easier to invest smarter. More work initially to triggers (entry points), set stops and targets, but then you let the position run and let the market tell you what to do, rather than the other way around, which rarely ever works.

Nothing is safe in short term, or long term for that matter if you just hold and hope for the best. The only good way to invest is to diversify into many stocks across many industries. Use technical analysis to time your entry and possible exists.

You mean a Depression, because we are in a recession or never got out of one, well in 2008 the U.S. Gov bailed out the bad banks which got us out of a recession in 2009; but then in 2010 we went back into a bad recession and now heading towards another great Depression in 2012 or 2013. Just research what out Gov is doing, printing too, too much money or devaluing our currency, our so called president is taking too much vacations which is too weird and is like hes being congratulated for screwing the economy even more. Just think out side the box and not in and you will see how screwed up this country is and will take decades to get back in order or better. The stock market is a gamble, not an investment based on my four year experience and research. I buy physical gold and silver as insurance like health insurance, hop not to use it but have it just in case bad things happen. Gold and silver will be a bubble in a decade but I buy for insurance purposes and not as an investment.

To me, a safe investment is to invest in companies that make or transport products everyone uses, uses up quickly creating the need to buy more. Things like soaps (Unilever), oil (with Libya opening up, Italy's Eni may do well), natural gas and natural gas pipelines,and food.

Since you mentioned SPDR GLD, i'll add in something I read the other day. "I contacted them at 866-320-4053 to ask if the physical gold bars are insured but they just side stepped the question and said HSBC bank has 'some sort' of insurance on their holdings. They won't say directly that the GLD physical gold bars are insured but yet they also won't say they are not insured too. One other question that SSgA dodged was when I asked them when they plan to readjust the GLD price to reflect the actual amount of physical gold in the HSBC vault. They sell off a portion of the physical gold to pay off expenses so as time goes on, the GLD price becomes less and less accurate in tracking the actual gold price." These GLD ETF issues reduce its prospect as a safe investment and I'd be careful when using it as an indicator too. Gold itself works well as insurance against recession but the "bubble theory" is damaging its reputation somewhat.