Someone today told me that gold is headed down now since the results
from the financial sector weren't as bad as expected. Certainly gold
price has dropped off substantially this week. Is it time now to start
taking profits? What's your outlook on gold for the next year?

I find it hard to believe that gold has peaked considering record
inflation.  It's not just inflation in the US market, but it's a
global phenomenon.  Even if they fed does cut rate in Sept., this will
not squelch the inflation flame.  The other speculative thing is that
the financials have hit a bottom.  Even if this is true, which is
still in doubt, why should it proclude gold from rising? It's not like
somebody can't put money in finance and gold at the same time.

Gold is long term.

On the contrary. Gold by itself does not generate value, it preserves
value. A gold bullion does not double every 10-15 years. A dollar
invested in gold in 1900 would be worth about $0.70 today. Having said
that, gold is just another strategy to diversify your portfolio. When
the times are bad, investors switch to gold to wait out the storm.
When the times are good they can make more money elsewhere and gold
goes down. My goal is about 10-20% of my portfolio to be gold or gold
miners. The ETF looks tempting at the moment, but for the time being I
have been dipping my toes in stock from individual companies.

If we break down your paragraph here we can further see you have half
the story.

If we look at how the price of Gold is determined through supply and
demand and the adverse effect of the dollars supply.  We can come to a
conclusion that it does generate value. If we could "print" Gold it
would lose value.  Gold does two things, it preserves and generates
value. Based on the above conditions.

How about 1 ounce of Gold invested in Jan. '71 at ~ $40 an ounce.  It
is now worth $920 an ounce.  $880 value per ounce of Gold difference
in only 37 years.  A 2200% increase.  I'm not sure where you get your
numbers.

The problem is I don't think you understand WHY.  Investors do this
because the value of the dollar goes down.  When this happens
commodities rise.  Look at oil / gold.  So, once again, Gold is
preserving its value AND generating MORE value (in a relative
perspective of a purchase price).

Does anyone know how to gain exposure to GLD in a currency other than
USD, like say the Euro?  If you wanted to be long of GLD in Euro's is
there an ETF out there that you could use?

try the swiss franc, CHF, paper money partly backed in gold. The Swiss
have some asset protection plans based in gold investments. XGD is a
canadian gold index fund by IShares. Both AUD and CAD are commodity
currencies you might be interested in looking at those too.