(MONEY Magazine) – Here's the plan: Start buying Canadian gold-mining stocks as a hedge against the coming hyperinflation. Then set up an Austrian bank account to guard your privacy after the ensuing crash. To prepare for the political upheaval that comes next, buy German bonds, consider moving to Australia, and . . . So it went at the 13th annual New Orleans Investment Conference, aptly described by one of its 83 speakers as ''the greatest investment show on earth.'' For 3 1/2 hectic days, the 2,000 attendees were held spellbound by fearful forecasts and breathless advice that sounded many familiar conservative themes. If the conference had a hard-money, anti-big-government tone, it is no Reagan-era happenstance. James U. Blanchard III, 43, an early convert to free-market economics when he first read Ayn Rand's novels as a college student, founded the National Committee for Monetary Reform 15 years ago; it sponsors the annual conference. From the first conference in 1974, Blanchard has tapped unerringly into the political and economic fears of a cross section of Americans: unchecked government growth at home, Communism abroad and a revival of inflation everywhere. This year some of those grim prognostications were beginning to sound plausible, as they played against the darkening backdrop of a drifting stock market, a black hole-like federal debt and a trade imbalance that deepens even as the dollar weakens. Consensus conclusions: -- Inflation will reignite -- and gold will reglitter -- sometime in 1987. -- Within the next two years, the stock market will reach new highs and investors will encounter many moneymaking opportunities. After that -- sometime between 1989 and 1991 -- comes the deluge. -- The new tax law so penalizes saving and investing that Congress will either have to make changes in 1987 or watch reform accelerate the market crash. The gathering was clearly a three-ring circus. In the first ring -- the 130,000-square-foot Rivergate auditorium -- a galaxy of viewpoints issued from speakers including respected stock pickers like Charles Allmon, strident libertarians like Douglas Casey, and conservative keynoters like Barry Goldwater and Pat Robertson. Ring two: seminars and product presentations in smaller meeting rooms. Ring three: an exhibition area with 153 booths where stunned investors were urged to step right up and consider buying, among other products and services, rare coins; shares in a Bahamian citrus grove; units in a jojoba bean limited partnership; stock in gold mines that have yet to produce gold; stock in an insurance exchange billed as the ''Lloyd's of Miami;'' a software package for trading commodities; a consultation with an investment psychologist; a money-market fund with 90% of its portfolio in foreign currencies; single-premium variable life insurance; and a slickly packaged version of financial planning called wealth management. Fully one- third of the exhibitors were hawking precious metals or information about them. What follows are convention snapshots: Palladium, Benjamin, palladium. Every year a single word sends an acquisitive thrill through the convention, much like the infamous advice about getting into ''plastic'' in the film The Graduate. The word this year: palladium. This precious metal, which is used in catalytic converters, is mined largely in South Africa and the Soviet Union, which together account for 90% of the world's supply. Palladium, recently selling at $130.50 an ounce, is this year's platinum, a precious metal that is now considered by the experts to be overpriced, largely because it was last year's word. The convert. This grandmotherly Kansas City woman, aged 62, hasn't missed a New Orleans conference in nine years. Like many attendees, she values her privacy as much as her gold, and agrees to discuss her investments only if her name is not used. ''I was influenced by my memories of the Depression,'' she says. ''You buy solid stocks and just stuff them in your sock forever.'' Then she saw the error of her ways. ''It was hard for me to change, but I did,'' she adds. Thanks to the New Orleans conferences, she is buying penny stocks now. Oh, she still has her Mobil, Exxon, Texaco and several utilities, but her heart belongs to such mining stocks as Galactic Resources, which she bought in July 1984 for $4.33 a share. She more than doubled her initial $2,200 investment in a year. This year's meeting has confirmed her feeling that interest rates are headed up, so she is planning to unload her utility stocks and municipal bonds. She will hold on to the oils because she thinks ''their day will dawn again, along with inflation.'' Her overall portfolio is whizzing along at a 23.7% annual rate of return: she started some 20 years ago with $2,500 and now has $175,000. Keep it simple. One of the most admired yet technically demanding speakers at New Orleans in recent years has been Robert Prechter, 37, a Yale University-educated investment analyst and newsletter editor from Gainesville, Ga. Prechter is the best-known exponent of Elliott wave theory, a type of technical analysis that plots cyclical shifts in mass-investor psychology. His recent record of stock market calls has been among the best, and he, unfortunately, foresees an epochal depression by the early 1990s. But this year he offers advice as sunny and simple as his own theories are dark and complex. Since most money managers fail to perform as well as Standard & Poor's 500-stock index, buy an index mutual fund tied to the S&P while the market is going up. When it starts down? Move to the very short term with Treasury bills and cash. And then? ''Move to Australia.'' Without a trace. At a lunchtime presentation on setting up an Austrian bank account, a white-haired man in the front row gets the ball rolling: How can he ''build up an account with the least publicity possible?'' Dr. Erich Stoeger, chairman of Focobank A.G., one of Austria's smaller banks, who is conducting this meeting, replies that deposits made by money orders or bank cashier's checks made out simply to Foco A.G. would not ''raise too much suspicion.''

I saw the light. Last year David R. Cox, 49, and his wife Judy, 42, attended their first New Orleans conference. Cox, who owns an aviation insurance agency in Knoxville, says he came away resolved to reduce his borrowings. In the past year he has slashed his debt on an open credit line by 75%. By next year he aims to be debt-free. ''With the possibility of a recession or depression ahead, it makes sense to me to minimize my debt and build a diversified, conservative portfolio,'' he says. His goal: 30% in real estate, 20% in predominantly global mutual funds, 20% in U.S. stocks or mutual funds, 10% in numismatic coins, 10% in precious metals and 10% in cash. In gold we trust. It's everybody's favorite, the Paul Newman of investments, and the convention consensus is that a gold bull market is off and galloping. Price estimates for the coming year among leading analysts at the conference ranged as high as $550 an ounce (for a contrary view, see page 7). Chief reason: foreign investors will move out of the declining dollar and into gold. But all gold does not gleam equally. For instance, the 1986 half- and quarter-ounce U.S. gold Eagle coins were in greater demand than one-ounce Eagles. Reason: only one-ninth as many are being produced. Numismatic coins in general are out of favor mostly because confusion in grading standards has led to pricing abuses. As for stocks, the new ingenues are second-tier North American mining companies such as Sonora Gold Corp., recently traded over the counter at $5.25. Sonora seduces investors with the romance of owning gold mined on sites of the California gold rush of 1849. There's only one problem: The veins won't start yielding their yellow treasure until this month. The sound of one dollar flapping. Sidney Pulitzer, a New Orleans economic forecasting newsletter publisher, captures the allure of gold. He stands in front of the audience, takes two gold Krugerrands from his pocket and strikes them together like crystal goblets next to the microphone. As the bell-like ping rings through the auditorium, he intones: ''That's the sound of real money.'' Bedazzled. Perhaps the greatest opportunity of all at the New Orleans conference is the one least talked about: the chance for the investment advisers who appear to pick up new clients. The pitch of choice is unblushing selfpromotion. Items: Jay Goldinger, a bond broker with Cantor Fitzgerald & Co. in Beverly Hills and one of the convention's most popular speakers, warns his listeners never to deal with a broker who needs your business, since he is apt to be more interested in his commissions than in helping you make money. Goldinger's advice: call around to brokerage houses and ask for the names of those brokers who make more than $1 million a year and earn 80% of that trading for their own accounts. (For another view on how to find a broker, see the story on page 208.) If you have trouble tracking down such a paragon, you will be glad to know Goldinger makes most of his income trading his own account and has earned, by his own admission, more than $5 million so far this year. Goldinger, who distributes a sales kit and a 45-minute tape of advice on tax reform, assures his audience that he is not looking for new customers. Donald Rowe, chairman of Carnegie Wealth Management, divulges that his company has identified through exhaustive study of 12,000 money managers five of the best. ''We even found a money manager who will pay your bills and do your income taxes,'' he says. ''You can't ask for more than that.'' Candid Cassandra. Mary E. Calhoun, a financial writer from Boston who had spent nine years as a stockbroker, strikes a consumerist nerve in her symposium on the ethics of brokers and financial planners. She admits cheerfully: ''In eight years as a Merrill Lynch broker, I never sold a limited partnership that made money.'' Milestone. Howard Ruff, whose newsletter Ruff Times sang lead tenor in the doom-and-gloom chorus of the late '70s, renamed his letter the Financial Success Report in 1982. Apparently good news was bad news: circulation sank from a high of 175,000 in early 1984 to about 100,000 lately. Now he has recanted his optimism and returned securely to the day-of-reckoning fold -- and to the Ruff Times logo. He even admits ''uncharacteristic bursts of an unfamiliar sensation called humility.'' The trouble with youth. During a dinner break one evening, more than 100 conventioneers pass up the chance to sample New Orleans cuisine to attend a special meeting of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in a conference room at the Hilton. Named for the founder (1881-1973) of the Austrian school of free- market economics, the institute is a haven for goldbugs. As the five panelists, all fortyish, talk on, a man in the back of the room roughly 20 years their senior whispers: ''These guys are too young to know anything.'' And then he leaves. Stormy weather. If debt overload does not bring on another Great Depression, the weather may. Climatologist Iben Browning of Sandia Park, N.M., a leading contender for most popular speaker, predicts a concatenation of volcanoes, tsunamis and earthquakes occurring throughout this month will cool tropical air and cause a late fall and bumper crops in 1987. But then, long cruel winters and volcanic eruptions in 1988 and 1989 will devastate farmland, causing Dust Bowl conditions and a severe economic depression lasting from 1989 to 1993. Like a Calvinist preacher, Browning tempers his predictions of fire and dust storms by telling his listeners that they are among the elect. ''Everyone here comes from an unbroken line of survivors,'' he says. ''People at this conference are likely to be winners.''