Maria Aspan

Do you have enough space?

Is it secure?

Are you worried about like...

home invasions or robberies?

Or like, do you have insurance?

There are all of these downsides of buying the physical valuable thing and keeping it somewhere where you have to spend time, money, or find space to store it.

As a broader investment class, if you're buying anything that's like not a mining company, but pegged to the price of gold, like a gold-backed ETF,

Gold doesn't pay dividends or interest in the same way that stocks or bonds do.

So you're buying something or you're buying a fund pegged to something, and you basically have to hold it until the price goes up and you sell it at the right time and reap the profit.

And this is something that has made, like, Warren Buffett, the legendary investor, say –

Yeah, gold isn't really worth it because you could buy a lot of other types of investments like company stocks or even land and they will generate actual income and revenue and pay dividends.

If you're buying a share of a company, you are in theory like watching that company make more money and grow in value over time and you're benefiting from that.

Gold, it's more about holding on to it and waiting to time your sale of it correctly.

Right.

So I talked about this with Katie Klingensmith.

She's the chief investment strategist for the financial advisor Edelman Financial Engines.

So she doesn't automatically include gold or other precious metals in the investment portfolios that she creates for her clients.

Yes.

Whereas as we've seen with the super volatile price of gold in the past year, and frankly, the volatile price of gold over time, yes, it's shiny.

Yes, it's solid.