Gold As An Investment: Your Guide

Investment is essential to build wealth and secure the future. Today there are numerous investment options like stocks, mutual funds, bonds, exchange traded funds (ETF), and many more to choose from. Since each type of investment involves some risk-reward ratio, one must evaluate the risk profile and then choose the right investment option.

One way to reduce the risk quotient is to plan investments across various financial instruments and categories. Balancing a diversified portfolio may be hard, but a safe haven investment to mitigate the risk.

Gold is a highly liquid asset that has the potential to reduce the investor credit risk. In India gold is predominantly used to make jewellery, given its inherent cultural significance. Also, as an investment gold can help in portfolio diversification due to its low correlation, low volatility, and utility value.

• Low Correlation:

A well-diversified portfolio is built based on assets that have low or negative correlation with each other. Gold, as a safe haven asset, is known to exhibit minimal correlation, or even negative correlation, with riskier assets like equities, stocks and bonds. Investing in gold works as a good hedge against currency volatility and inflation since rising inflation raises the value of gold.

• Low Volatility:

Equities become volatile with interest rate hikes and lower purchasing power of consumers due to the rising inflation. Contrarily, gold moves higher with inflation. So, as an asset class with lower volatility gold negates the hitch.

• Utility Value:

There is recurring demand for gold due to its inherent value.

But how can gold practically add to diversification of investment portfolios? Here's how investors can plan a gold investment in India:

• Physical Gold:

The direct way to possess gold is to purchase physical gold bars or coins of any size. The yellow metal is held by a third-party depository against storage fees. In case investors want to store it themselves, they can take physical delivery of the gold.
But holding bars and coins can have a drawback. Investors need to bear the insurance costs and also, must pay a premium over the metal spot price on gold because of manufacturing and distribution markups.

• Exchange-Traded Funds(ETFs):

This is an alternative to direct purchase of gold bullion. ETFs are the safest way to invest in gold because investors need not undertake the hassles of storing the physical gold. The purchased gold is stored in Demat (paper) format. Thus, they are cost-effective and an obvious choice for small investors.
These funds may be traded just like stocks, in any brokerage account or individual retirement account (IRA). The fund’s operator is responsible for handling the costs of gold and charging an expense ratio.
But some gold funds may not be beneficial, especially the ones for lower long-term capital-gains rates.

• Gold Mining Companies:

Some investors like to own shares of companies that mine for gold. These companies specialize in mining and refining gold. Gold mining shares can be bought by investing in the company's stocks or royalties, as well as gold mining exchange traded funds (ETFs) and mutual funds.

But the question here is how much should one invest in gold. Many experts believe that investors should limit around 10-15% of their investment to purchase gold. The number can go up in the face of a tumbling economy or with a rise in the government debt. Whatever the percentage be, while deciding how much to invest, one must never lose sight of the overall financial goals.

Conclusion

There are a few conventional and modern types of gold investments. The conventional way includes simple purchase of physical gold in the forms of jewellery, coins, bars, or artifacts. But many modern day investors prefer gold ETF and gold funds.

Unlike stocks and bonds, gold does not fetch a regular income in the form of interests and dividends. But it delivers long-term returns and also helps in improving the investment diversification portfolio.

Before deciding the right financial instrument based on personal requirement, one must have adequate knowledge of the markets and also, must be willing to and to spend enough time choosing the best investment option. However, if you are not convinced of gold as an investment and have idle gold assets at home, you can opt for gold loan investment during any crisis.

Is the idea of a gold loan running through your mind? Herein lies another benefit of applying for loans at IIFL Finance. IIFL offers the best value for your gold. All IIFL gold loan products have short processing times followed by short-time disbursals and are thus designed to relieve you of your burden.