I differ from the common wisdom of the board and am not an indexer, and I believe the evidence supports that the market is inefficient, but from the sound of it your husband is a speculator or gambler and not an investor. If he is handling any more than a small portion of your net worth, I'd be very concerned.
Most of the great investors throughout history and existing today have been value investors. I think the best book to read on this subject is Seth Klarman's book Margin of Safety - here is a discussion and a link to the book (it's out of print):
http://theconservativeincomeinvestor.com/2013/08/07/seth-klarmans-margin-of-safety-the-most-legendary-book-in-personal-finance/I'd highly encourage anyone investing in individual stocks to read the book. The very first point made is the difference between investment and speculation. Speculation is buying something because you think someone else will pay more for it tomorrow. Investing is buying a stock because it is a piece of a business that you expect to produce cash flows that will more than compensate you for the price you are paying. Margin of Safety, the title of the book, is the concept that since future cash flows are inherently uncertain, you should only buy a business at a substantial discount to what you believe its value to be, giving yourself a margin for error in your calculations.
Non-productive commodities like gold are the definition of speculative assets. Even if gold falls 50% from the price it is trading at today, you could not buy it with a margin of safety because there is no way to calculate the value of gold - it doesn't produce any cash, it just sits there and looks shiny.
Value investing is all about buying out-of-favor businesses and assets, but only when those businesses and assets are out of favor for bad reasons. Sometimes stocks fall X% on news of a bad event that reduces the value of the business by .5X%; sometimes, the bad event actually reduced the value of the business by X% or more, and buying at that price doesn't indicate you are getting any better value today than yesterday.
On the subject of buying companies below the value of their net current assets, while this can in theory be a great idea (Buffett made a killing buying so-called "net-nets" when he was running his partnership in the 1950s and 1960s), in today's world there is generally a reason why these companies are trading at such levels. It's too easy to run a screen to find these ideas for many good ones to exist. In reality, there can be many pitfalls with buying these companies - for example, there may be liabilities that are off balance sheet or underestimated (for a retailer, think operating leases which you won't find anywhere on the balance sheet but are contracts that can't be killed off at will; for a miner, think of potential environmental and cleanup liabilities, underestimated pensions and other retirement benefit liabilities, etc). Also, if you are minority shareholder, you cant force the company to liquidate and give you the cash on hand - and management is hardly ever incentivized to close down the business and liquidate, because then they lose their jobs! Also, liquidation takes time, and bad businesses will destroy value over time, reducing the value by the time the liquidation is finished - think of Sears, where the real estate has been worth dramatically more than the stock price, but the retail operation is eating billions of value each year, and can't be liquidated overnight.