Episode Details

As promised, here is my updated guide to buying and investing in gold. I really think it is important that you own some, given what governments are doing to currency.

Spool down to the bottom if you want to see this guide in video form.

I have also made this available as a PDF, which you can download here:

(If that PDF doesn’t work, try this link)

We are living in a world of uncertainty. There is inflation, war, political discontent, financial instability and, perhaps most concerning of all, state incompetence everywhere you look. The case for owning gold, for having wealth stored outside the system, where it is nobody else’s liability, is as strong as it has ever been.

“Put 10% of your net worth in gold, and hope it doesn’t go up,” is something I am very fond of saying.

If gold is going up, it usually means something somewhere isn’t right.

That’s very much the case today.

How to invest in gold.

There are five ways:

* You can go old school and buy bullion - coins or bars.

* You can buy gold stored in vaults in places like London, Jersey, Zurich or Singapore. This gold is allocated to you.

* You can buy ETFs via your stock broker. These are funds that store gold. The price of the fund tracks the gold price, and you own shares in the fund. (See footnote , if you need to understand what an ETF is).

* You can buy gold companies - refiners, royalty companies, miners and so on.

* You can buy futures, CFDs or spreadbets.

I’m not talking today about buying mining companies (if you are interested in mining companies, consider a paid subscription, as gold mining companies are one of my areas of expertise). Nor am I talking about futures, CFDs or spread betting the gold price. Neither safeguards your wealth. They are speculations. In the right market they can make you a lot of money. In the wrong market, they can also lose you a lot.

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Today we are talking about old school, physical gold

I’ll put to one side arguments about whether gold is a good investment or not (I think it is), and whether I think it is going up or down. I’ll simply explain what is the easiest, cheapest and, perhaps above all, safest way to buy gold.

A note on ETFs

ETFs are a simple way to get exposure to the gold price. It’s not really the same as owning actual metal, so the purists tend to veer away from ETFs, but institutions like them, as do traders, because they are easy to buy and sell. You buy an ETF just as you would buy any stock or share through your broker. London-listed gold ETFs include RMAU.L and PHAU.L. The world’s biggest is the NYSE-listed GLD. Costs - for example storage - are baked into the price.

To buy an ETF, you need an account with a broker, such as Hargreaves Lansdown or Interactive Investor. You deposit money and buy through them.

I steer away from ETFs mainly because they are too easy to get shaken out of. When you buy physical gold, to sell can be a bit of an undertaking, so it’s less likely to be done on a whim. Owning physical turns you into a long-term investor. It may be that you never sell at all and end up passing the gold on to your heirs.

So where do you buy gold from?

I’ve used many bullion dealers over the years. The dealer I like most, and with whom I have an affiliation deal, is the Pure Gold Company. Pre