Investing for Beginners 06: Gold ETF & Silver ETF Avoid the Scam When you invest in a gold or silver exchange-traded fund, you do not become the sole owner of actual gold or silver. For an ETF represented to be backed by gold or silver, the fund managers will contract with a custodian to hold the gold or silver in a vault. The custodian is usually a large, international bank, serving as a custodian for numerous customers. Most of the time, because the custodian is a huge multi-national corporation with thousands of accounts, when gold or silver is bought or sold, the metal never physically moves. Title to the bars of gold or silver is simply transferred from the seller to the buyer as a book entry in a massive computer network. This is where problems can arise: If the custodian is allowed to appoint sub-custodians, and the sub-custodians are allowed to appoint sub-sub-custodians and so on, now the gold or silver is spread out over various geographic locations. The only way to prove these sub-custodians hold enough gold or silver at any given point in time to fully back the account is for the ETF to require the custodian and all sub-custodians to be audited, during non-trading hours, all on the same day. If the gold ETF or silver ETF does not regularly require this type of audit of its custodian and sub-custodians, chances are high that the same physical gold may be purchased or owned by the same entity or individual at the same time. Many metals experts believe that silver ETFs and gold ETFs may hold less than the amount of precious metals they supposedly own or none at all. For most of us precious metals investors, the essence of keeping your hard-earned wealth in precious metals is to own a physical asset that can weather any economic storm. When you put your wealth in ETFs, you simply become an unsecured creditor of a mega-bank that will happily gobble up your wealth if financial turmoil strikes. As is true of any electronic or paper form of wealth, the investor can be denied access to the value of his or her gold ETF or silver ETF shares due to Acts of God, war, force majeure, confiscation, computer glitches, fraud, insolvency, lawsuits, liens, garnishment, etc. Given those caveats, coupled with the very real possibility that silver and gold ETFs are not backed by physical gold or silver, investing in real, physical gold or silver will always be the safer bet. The higher premiums investors pay for physical gold and silver stored either their home or in a segregated fully insured vault account seems a small price to pay in exchange for a safe and secure investment. One final note on silver and gold ETFs, due to high annual ETF management fees, more often than not, it is much less expensive to store precious metals in a private, segregated, fully insured gold and silver vault as opposed to having your silver ETF or gold ETF shares diluted from exchange trade fund or ETF management fees. Intro by: Laurent Caccia http://www.youtube.com/laurentcaccia
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