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Hello, my name is Mark Griffith, and this is going to be a very short introduction into
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how to buy gold. Essentially there are three ways in which you can invest in gold. The
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simplest, the most obvious is buying physical gold, and that would be buying for example,
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gold jewelry, buying crew grams, buying ingots of gold, bars of gold. The second way that
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you should think about this is buying some kind of contract, its price is fixed to the
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price of gold. And both Chicago and New York there are contracts available where you can
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effectively buy something that means you have ownership of that gold, or you have ownership
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of a contract who's price tracks the price of gold, but you don't have to take ownership
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of it physically. That's the problem with the first type, is you have to decide where
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to store the gold bars, lets say you've bought yourself five gold bars, you have to put them
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somewhere. In fact, you probably will be leaving them at a bank in a deposit accounting cage,
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or in a safe somewhere, and you might have to pay for that. So there's physical ownership
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of gold, then there's ownership of a paper contract, which is designed so the price tracks
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the price of gold. And the third popular way to do it, is to buy shares in gold mining
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companies, and there's a variety of mining companies of course. There's some which only
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mine gold, there's some which mine a whole range of minerals. And you have a serious
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of problems there. One of the problems is that like all shares it's more complicated
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than simply the price of gold, that's to say, the company might have excellent gold reserves,
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but it might be badly managed, or the company might be very well managed, and actually have
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not such good gold reserves. So the closer you move towards buying shares in mining companies,
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the more complicated things will get. On the other hand, it's very simply easy to buy and
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sell shares and on occasion you might find it difficult, for example if you have physical
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possession of gold, it can be quite difficult to sell the gold. So you want to bare in mind,
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do you want to have the gold physically, do you want a contract that tracks the price
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of gold precisely, or are you happy to simply add some mining companies, some gold mining
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companies to your share portfolio. Think about those three, and then you should be in a position
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to get yourself into the gold market. One other thing to consider, is that lots and
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lots of gold is held in bullion form by central banks, and is used by central banks as an
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instrument for covering losses, for moving their own currency around, for defending their
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own currency. So if the currency is weakening, you might find that they are selling off gold
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in order to pay for day to day operations to defend their currency. What that means
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is gold is a good investment, but it's not as straight forward as it looks, it's widely
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used as a bullion reserve by large banks, and therefore the price can move in unexpected
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directions, so be careful. Good luck.