What if...I want to buy a gold ETF?
From ETFs backed by bullion to miners with more upside potential - here's how to get yourself some gold.
This is a new Morningstar video series that answers your 'What If...' questions
Narrator: With all the uncertainty around, you’d be forgiven for wanting to hold on to something safe to protect yourself and your family. I mean, stocks sound great and all, but they’re just numbers on a screen. Now gold, that’s something you can hold.
But if you’d rather not be pitched headfirst into a volcano, or pay storage and security costs to ensure Hobbit thieves don’t get their hands on your gold, you could hold paper gold – through an Exchange Traded fund.
What If You Want to Buy a Gold ETF?
The first thing to remember is you could get gold exposure in three ways. A bullion ETF, A gold-miner ETF, or a miner stock. They’re all different though. Here’s how.
Kristoffer Inton: A bullion ETF buys and stores the gold for you, and trades on an exchange, which makes buying and selling your gold a lot easier. But you’ll have to pay a fee for the convenience. A gold-miner ETF gives you levered exposure to gold prices, so when gold prices rise, a miner should outperform bullion, all else equal. Plus, the nice thing about a miner ETF is that you diversify away some company-specific risk. Which brings us to miner stocks. Remember, company-specific risk can also be an opportunity. For example, if a miner boosted production or lowered costs, we’d expect to see that reflected in the stock, but it would be averaged away across the portfolio of miners in the ETF.
Narrator: That’s how you can have your gold – and hold it too!
