Chris Olson

It's an asset that moves contrary to other assets, so it's a way to balance a portfolio to some extent.

Where does it come from?

Well, the gold market internationally is...

primarily operated through exchanges such as the COMEX operated by the CME Group out of New York, the London Bullion Market Association in London, the Shanghai Gold Exchange.

There are other gold exchanges in, say, Russia and in India as well.

And so that's where the bulk of the trading occurs, where they're clearing hundreds of millions of dollars every single day.

in contracts, and that's being fed primarily by refineries who are purchasing the gold from mines and also are trading gold that already exists.

That's the major source of gold, and that's usually in the form of large exchange-traded standardized bars in bulk, like the COMEX contract here in the United States is settled in a 100-ounce gold bar.

And so that would be a single futures contract that firms like us would purchase, or other people who need to buy and sell futures contracts will purchase that type of

of a commodity.

From that point, bulk gold is taken and it is further processed into smaller coins and bars by private mints and by government mints, specifically for the purpose of making it available to people that want to buy it in formats that are useful to the average person.

And so the primary source is going to be big banks, funds, ETFs that are trading, mines, and also the secondary market where whenever there's a large amount of liquidation that's happening, if there's more than the retail market,

can absorb of retail dealers, let's say, and I'm referring to that as just the the non exchange traded markets.

Just this is the open market in the United States, for example.

If people sell too much,

as they have been for the last year and a half.

What that market needs to do then is absorb all of that selling pressure and a lot of times they'll have to send it to a refinery and have it melted down so that it can be cast into formats that can be delivered into the futures markets where there's deeper liquidity, there's more money

to absorb the purchasing power or the selling demand of the market.

So even the secondary market will at times be feeding back into that.

So there's a lot of plumbing internationally.