How to buy gold investment coins

Fees for actively managed funds, meanwhile, can be materially higher than those of index-based products. Diversification Upside from mine development Usually tracks gold prices. Philip van Doorn. Comment icon. Although panning for gold was a common practice during the California Gold Rush, nowadays it is mined from the ground.

How buying gold coins online works

Do you want to invest in gold coins safely with a credit card? There are many reasons why you should start buying and selling gold coins. Gold is a natural hedge against the stock market and entrepreneurs buy them for various reasons. Gold offers benefits far beyond the fact that its price can rise. For instance, gold is a tangible asset. Also people buy gold coins because they are free of counter-party risk.

Why is gold valuable?

The most trusted gold in the world is also the cheapest to buy and own, and the safest. You could go straight to the wholesale markets and buy more reliable, safer and cheaper Good Delivery bullion which you will quickly find is also much easier to store, insure, and later sell. Your maximum round trip dealing costs for Good Delivery bullion at BullionVault would be 1. Gold coins and small bars are neither the cheapest nor the safest way to buy gold. If you choose them you may well:. The additional costs and complexities of storing and insuring gold coins were not considered in this comparison. For instant dealing they are invariably within 0.

Here’s everything you need to know about how to invest in this precious metal.

The most trusted gold in the world is also the cheapest to buy and own, and the safest. You could go straight to the wholesale markets and buy more reliable, safer and cheaper Good Delivery bullion which you will quickly find is also much easier to store, insure, and later sell.

Your maximum round trip dealing costs for Good Delivery bullion at BullionVault would be 1. Gold coins and small bars are neither the cheapest nor the safest way to buy gold. If you choose them you may well:. The additional costs and complexities of storing and insuring gold coins were not considered in this comparison. For instant dealing they are invariably within 0. In addition there is 0. Many of them began by looking at how they should buy gold coins, and then changed their mind and bought Good Delivery bullion instead.

They chose BullionVault because it avoids so many of the costs and problems associated with gold coin investment. As a result they feel genuinely safer, they spent a lot less time getting things done, and they spent a lot less money.

They also know they can sell more easily for a higher price — whenever they want. Our solutions to the problems of buying gold are widely recognised as the best, and we offer the lowest prices — guaranteed. When you buy gold coins and small bars they are priced according to the world market inter-bank gold price. Good Delivery bullion is what defines the benchmark inter-bank gold price. It trades without a mark-up, and it guarantees no fakes.

You can buy Good Delivery bullion directly on the wholesale markets as a private investor. There you will pay the current world market inter-bank gold price. Beyond this you will pay only 0. Buying and later selling Good Delivery bullion will cost you a maximum of 1. On larger sums that comes down to about 0. Good Delivery bullion is standard-sized, large bar gold or silver of proven weight, purity, origin and history.

These bars are the assumed settlement form for professional bullion market trades, where pricing is keenest. You cannot settle a professional bullion market trade with gold coins. They will neither be delivered to you nor accepted from you. If you buy coins you will have to trade with coin dealers, where liquidity is not nearly so deep and prices are not nearly so competitive as on the professional bullion markets.

With Good Delivery bullion you used to have to buy a whole bar — fully That has changed. Since BullionVault has allowed you to deal part of a bar in amounts down to 1 gram. You buy at professional market prices, continue accumulating at your own pace, and sell back whatever amount you have, whenever you want, again how to buy gold investment coins the professional market price.

BullionVault — where you would buy your Good Delivery bullion — is much bigger than most coin merchants, and much more financially robust. Then it provides you direct access to the liquidity of the world market when you want to sell. It is the safest and most economical way to own real gold; and with 75, users and a five star rating one of the most popular. They are all authorised professional market vault operators and independent of BullionVault.

They produce a bar list every day which BullionVault publishes — and next to it is published a pseudonymous register of all the owners of the gold on the list — matched to the gram. Your gold balance will appear on that register, under your pseudonym which only you know. The economic refining process for gold gets the purity to just over Because, from here, about half of all gold will be alloyed for jewellery manufacture e.

Consumers worldwide increasingly demand So called four nines gold requires electrolytic refining, and of course the cost is passed through to the ultimate buyer. No intrinsic value is added with In fact if gold coins are later re-cast into large bars as many are, to be sold at the Good Delivery bullion price this loses both the cost of electrolytic refining and the There is little trading benefit to On wholesale markets both If dealers deliver So for all practical purposes cost conscious investors should stick with Producers will usually buy their gold as Good Delivery bullion bars, so these extra charges apply when converting large bars into smaller articles, and naturally the costs are passed on to the ultimate buyer.

Neither seignorage, nor fabrication, imparts a lasting value to bullion products. The highest bid prices for gold are for raw bullion in Good Delivery form. Coin dealers suffer highly variable demand, which routinely multiplies during financial stresses, and then turns negative when the financial world is calm and customers are selling back to the dealers.

For coin dealers the result is a cycle of shortage, then glut, which means high prices or low prices at the time of maximum disadvantage to the majority of their customers. When dealers are short of stock they ration buyers by raising the price for immediate delivery, and only those prepared to pay higher prices get their gold while the panic is on. In such a crisis, if you want to pay a fair price, you will have to wait several weeks for coin delivery while the mints catch up with their orders.

When calm returns, and savers are selling, the dealers rapidly become overstocked. The resulting gluts will force them to finance and hedge which is punitive or to re-cast their surplus gold coins and small bars as large bars, to sell where the liquidity is deepest.

That will complete a redundant and expensive circuit from bullion bar, to coin, to bullion bar, which is never experienced by those who elect to own their gold as Good Delivery bullion from the outset.

Coin shops are both labour and capital intensive. Even small shops require two staff for security reasons and maintaining both a secure workplace, and a workable stock of gold products, requires a lot of capital. Yet typically they only average a few customers a day. On-line shops do save on location costs, because they are not on the High Street, but they suffer from the high costs of marketing and insured bullion delivery.

Coin dealers usually address their high cost-base with high mark-ups [see panel below]. So before you buy gold coins download the BullionVault App to your mobile phone. Use it to check the price you would be paying on BullionVault, against what is quoted by your gold coin dealer.

Storage space for gold coins is relatively inexpensive. You have two main options :— a highly rated safe at home, or a commercial safety deposit box. Do not be tempted simply to hide your gold coins somewhere at home.

Thieves often use modern metal detectors, which are gold-sensitive. Battery operated electronic combination safes are generally recommended because they avoid the problem of what to do with the key. Take care to ensure your lock includes an emergency power socket in case of dead batteries. You will need a concrete floor and a brick or stone wall behind, which should not be accessible from the rear.

Your safe will probably be installed with 6 inch bolts set in resin, applied into holes drilled in the floor and wall.

Once complete you can usually only remove the safe intact by drilling out the bolt heads from the inside the safe. Check the rating before you buy. Although this sort of safe will deter most intruders it will also advertise where the valuables in your home are stored, and it would be unlikely to hold a determined thief at bay for long. An ordinary metal cutting wheel on a household drill, and an uninterrupted hour, would defeat your defences.

So it is essential that you extend your home insurance to cover your gold coins. If this is not the case, or if your deposited items are likely to exceed this value, the insurance though relatively straightforward to arrange is usually very expensive. Thereafter it costs 0. Beyond this small quantity you are unlikely to find a cheaper or easier way than BullionVault to both store and insure your gold.

The mathematics of risk for gold storage are well understood, and insurance actuaries know that although there are certainly risks during transportation, an approved long term storage vault within the professional bullion market system is by far the safest place to keep gold. So it is very much cheaper and easier to insure gold when it is kept in these professional vaults.

On BullionVault you buy your gold in situ — i. This saves you organising shipments, paying shipping costs, and making yourself available to sign the receipt on delivery to your door.

This is the only ongoing fee you are required to pay for holding Good Delivery gold at BullionVault. For a small number of coins, of limited value, often the most convenient and confidential storage solution is at home, in an insurance rated safe.

This definitely works best when you do not need to itemise your gold coins nor extend your household insurance. If these conditions are met, and no other terms in your insurance contract are breached, then keeping a small number of gold coins at home is a reasonably safe and economic storage solution. This will include Once insured remember to monitor the values of your gold coins.

If they rise too fast your insurance limit is likely to be exceeded and re-create the above problems for you.

This inconvenience never happens on BullionVault because all insurance is adjusted automatically to current bullion values. By contrast fake coins certainly exist, and small bars circulating in private ownership are known to have been filled with tungsten — a metal of similar density to gold.

Most of us are forced to rely on the last expert to handle our gold. When we sell — sometimes decades after we bought — we are presented with a difficult dilemma when the dealer goes into a back room to test our gold for authenticity. When these cause a run on a rapidly depreciating currency governments tend to initiate capital controls, which are programs for preventing the flight of usable capital from their country.

It may well be possible to sell gold owned domestically during such a crisis. Meanwhile informal channels the black market extract the deep discounts of dealing in illegal contraband, and much of the value will be lost to middlemen. Whichever crisis a gold coin buyer is seeking to avoid it turns out that making an immediate and sensible choice of offshore storage location is the best guarantor of being able to access the value of the gold when it is required.

Domestic governments find it impossible to act effectively against privately owned gold stored overseas.

Where To Buy & NOT Buy Gold & Silver

What’s wrong with buying gold coins?

For most investors, buying stock in a streaming and royalty company is probably the best all-around option for investing in gold. If paper money were to suddenly become worthless, the world would have to fall back on something of value to facilitate trade. For example, seawater contains gold — but in such small quantities it would cost more to extract than the gold would be worth. Both also have exposure to other metals, but ckins latter focuses on smaller miners; their expense ratios are 0. This is the key factor that gives streaming companies an edge as an investment. Since they were first offered, American Eagle gold bullion coins have been a great choice for those who want to add precious metals to their portfolio a few thousand dollars at a time. That combination is hard to beat. This is why some investors turn to mining stocks. This creates leverage, which increases an investor’s potential gains — and losses. These are the best option for owning physical gold. Image source: Getty Images. You might find coins how to buy gold investment coins all types fascinating. Miners begin by finding a place where they believe gold is located in large enough quantities that it can be economically obtained. Opinion: How to get started with gold-coin investing. They are like specialty finance coinw that get paid in gold, allowing them to avoid many of the headaches and risks associated with running a .