sophie wrote: ↑Mon May 29, 2017 5:02 pm
As dualstow observed, there's been quite a few discussions of gold recently. This question hasn't come up recently though, and I can't even remember any old threads about it.
Like everyone else, I hold a lot of gold ETF shares because there aren't a lot of options in tax-advantaged accounts, but I'm increasingly nervous about it. These funds often trade differently from gold price, and the discrepancy can be substantial. The recent takeover of GTU and the problems at some funds during the 2013 drawdown makes it clear that there's more to the value of ETF shares than gold price. Since gold is meant in part as protection for extreme situations, I'm not sure I want to be testing those waters further with ETFs. Gold is the one place in the portfolio where you really want to be ultra-conservative.
Putting all the gold into taxable, where there are much better options, would be great, but the math doesn't work out for me. I'm happy for cash and gold to dominate in taxable, but I don't want things to be too out of whack.
An option for retirement accounts that I'm considering as an ETF alternative is buying gold coins within an IRA. In most cases you'd have to open a special account and deal with astronomical fees, but Fidelity has recently made this a viable option, with fees not much higher than an ETF. The coins are kept in unallocated storage at the Bank of Nova Scotia. There is still some manager risk (i.e. you have to trust Fidelity and its partner bank), but there are fewer layers to worry about. I'd posted about this before but as kind of a side issue. Here's Fidelity's info page on its gold bullion program:
https://www.fidelity.com/trading/invest ... r-platinum
In a nutshell: buying + selling fees on amounts between $5,000 and 50,000 total 4.5%, and for transactions over $50,000 it's 2.98%. Annual storage costs are 0.5% (billed quarterly and you can pay from another account). These were lowered recently from 2-3% the last time I'd checked. In comparison, the bid-ask spread at Colorado Gold is 3.5%, IAU's ER is 0.25%, and GLD's ER is 0.4%.
Everbank has a similar program, but the fees are much higher than Fidelity's. Ditto for specialist precious metal IRAs. Frankly I'm amazed that Fidelity has been able to offer the program at these prices. It's almost too good to be true.
I was thinking I'd like to leave something like 20% of my gold allocation in ETFs, for ease of rebalancing, and put the rest into the Fidelity precious metals program as "deep" gold. Buying amounts >$50K would be worth it to minimize transaction costs.