Maria Aspan

And then everyone sees the price of gold goes up, which makes you and me sit down and be like, oh, gold is really going up.

Should I invest in it?

Maybe it's a good investment.

I don't want to be left behind.

Yes, it's the price of an ounce of physical gold, but there are a couple of different prices.

There's the spot price, which is what it is to buy gold on the spot, meaning right now, or there are gold futures, which is...

like any other future, a contract that an investor enters into to buy gold when it hits a certain price.

Now, spot gold can often influence the price of futures, and they tend to be connected.

Sometimes there's a big difference, but often not.

Gold jewelry has long been a way of buying gold, a way of, like, storing value and giving people gifts or making sure that your loved ones has something that has an inherent worth in and of itself, right?

We could go to Costco today and buy some gold.

Yes.

And frankly, when we're talking about should you buy gold as part of your broader investment portfolio, we're probably talking about some of the less literal types of gold.

So you could buy into their exchange-traded funds or ETFs that are pegged to the price of gold.

You could also buy into companies or funds backed by the stock of companies that are like in the gold industry, so like mining companies.

I mean –

Literally, the companies selling the modern-day equivalent of picks and shovels.

So jokes about Costco aside, there are things you have to think about with each type of investing in gold that you're considering.

And let's say investing in precious metals more generally.

If you're buying the physical stuff, you have to think about where are you going to store it?