23.10.2015 - The Cost of Physical Gold vs. Futures
Suppose you plan to buy gold, hold it 10 years, and sell it at the end. Is it more cost-effective to buy physical metal, store it, and sell it at the end? Or are you better off buying futures? It’s easy to calculate the cost of physical metal. If you buy at $4 over spot, that’s about 35 basis points (bps). You will also pay for storage an insurance, say 30 bps per year. In 10 years, you sell it at the spot price. Your total cost is about 3.3%. If you started with enough to dollars to buy 400oz of gold, then at the end you would have dollars equal to about 386.8oz at the then-current price of gold. Futures contracts are more complicated. When you buy, there is almost no premium (10 or 20 cents). However, there is a commission of around $0.25 an ounce. So initially, you get more gold. See the graph above, zoomed in to show the small difference in cost between the two approaches to holding gold for 10 years and then selling it...............................................Full Article: Source
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