Buy Gold Bullion India ^HOT^
As one of the oldest commodities in history, precious metals like gold and silver have been and likely will continue to be incredibly desirable. Now, you buy gold with a (slightly) newer commodity: Bitcoin (BTC).
buy gold bullion india
A Gold ETF is an exchange-traded fund (ETF) that aims to track the domestic physical gold price. They are passive investment instruments that are based on gold prices and invest in gold bullion.
In short, Gold ETFs are units representing physical gold which may be in paper or dematerialised form. One Gold ETF unit is equal to 1 gram of gold and is backed by physical gold of very high purity. Gold ETFs combine the flexibility of stock investment and the simplicity of gold investments.
Because of its direct gold pricing, there is a complete transparency on the holdings of a Gold ETF. Further due to its unique structure and creation mechanism, the ETFs have much lower expenses as compared to physical gold investments.
Gold ETFs are subject to market risks impacting the price of gold. Gold ETFs are subject to SEBI Mutual Funds Regulations. Regular audit of the physical gold bought by fund houses by a statutory auditor is mandatory.
A transformation has been occurring in the gold arena over the past few years and it looks to continue as the recession continues to loom and spread around the financial world like a fast moving virus.
Jewelry has always been the traditional outlet for gold sales for many years, but now this is being overtaken by, what one analyst termed, "a veracious demand for gold bullion by traditional investors."
Demand usually leads the price so this might partially explain why the price of gold has increased recently. The heavy buying trend has resulted in the sale of gold bullion overtaking the gold jewelry market for the first time in 30 years. GFMS, the consultancy firm that compiles benchmark supply-and-demand data on the precious metal, recently stated "gold investment demand doubled to 1,820 tonnes, while jewelry purchases fell by 23% to 1,687 tonnes, a 21-year low." GFMS also indicated that gold jewelry demand has fallen by a third from a peak of 3,294 tonnes.
The other major change in the gold market has been an increasing trend of central banks to now buy gold bullion. For 20 years, banks were the sellers of gold. But that trend has now reversed as banks in Europe slow down their gold sales and banks in China, India and Russia and the South Americas increase their gold buying significantly.
India's recent purchase of 200 tonnes of IMF gold, Beijing's announcement it had effectively doubled its gold reserves and was now the fifth largest holder of gold, all seem to indicate a serious preference for gold over currency.
This strong trend towards gold was recently highlighted by the Swiss bank, UBS, which found that almost a quarter of central banks believed gold would become the most important reserve asset in the next 25 years.
Gold futures are a good way to speculate on the price of gold rising (or falling), and you could even take physical delivery of gold, if you wanted, though physical delivery is not what motivates speculators.
The biggest advantage of using futures to invest in gold is the immense amount of leverage that you can use. In other words, you can own a lot of gold futures for a relatively small sum of money. If gold futures move in the direction you think, you can make a lot of money very quickly.
Risks: ETFs give you exposure to the price of gold, so if it rises or falls, the fund should perform similarly, again minus the cost of the fund itself. Like stocks, gold can be volatile sometimes, but these ETFs allow you to avoid the biggest risks of owning the physical commodity: protecting your gold and obtaining full value for your holdings.
India has a long history of paying close attention to the purity and quality of gold in practically all solid forms. Plus, the purchase of gold here is one of the most common practices in major port cities, such as Kochi.
If you are looking to buy gold in India, you will see prices quoted in the local currency. You may also see prices quoted in other key global currencies such as U.S. Dollars, euros, Great British Pounds or Japanese Yen. Gold is typically quoted by the ounce, gram or kilo.
In and around India, gold bars in both 22 carat and 24 carat purities may be widely exchanged, with popular sizes being 1 tola, 5 tola and 10 tola. The tola is a unit of measure originally from South Asia, and one Indian tola is approximately 11.66 grams.
Of all the precious metals, gold is the most popular as an investment. Investors generally buy gold as a way of diversifying risk, especially through the use of futures contracts and derivatives. The gold market is subject to speculation and volatility as are other markets. Compared to other precious metals used for investment, gold has been the most effective safe haven across a number of countries.[1]
Gold has been used throughout history as money and has been a relative standard for currency equivalents specific to economic regions or countries, until recent times. Many European countries implemented gold standards in the latter part of the 19th century until these were temporarily suspended in the financial crises involving World War I.[2] After World War II, the Bretton Woods system pegged the United States dollar to gold at a rate of US$35 per troy ounce. The system existed until the 1971 Nixon Shock, when the US unilaterally suspended the direct convertibility of the United States dollar to gold and made the transition to a fiat currency system. The last major currency to be divorced from gold was the Swiss Franc in 2000.[3]
Since 1919 the most common benchmark for the price of gold has been the London gold fixing, a twice-daily telephone meeting of representatives from five bullion-trading firms of the London bullion market. Furthermore, gold is traded continuously throughout the world based on the intra-day spot price, derived from over-the-counter gold-trading markets around the world (code "XAU"). The following table sets out the gold price versus various assets and key statistics at five-year intervals.[4]
Given the huge quantity of gold stored above ground compared to the annual production, the price of gold is mainly affected by changes in sentiment, which affects market supply and demand equally, rather than on changes in annual production.[14] According to the World Gold Council, annual mine production of gold over the last few years has been close to 2,500 tonnes.[15] About 2,000 tonnes goes into jewelry, industrial and dental production, and around 500 tonnes goes to retail investors and exchange-traded gold funds.[15]
Central banks and the International Monetary Fund play an important role in the gold price. At the end of 2004, central banks and official organizations held 19% of all above-ground gold as official gold reserves.[16] The ten-year Washington Agreement on Gold (WAG), which dates from September 1999, limited gold sales by its members (Europe, United States, Japan, Australia, the Bank for International Settlements and the International Monetary Fund) to less than 400 tonnes a year.[17] In 2009, this agreement was extended for five years, with a limit of 500 tonnes.[18] European central banks, such as the Bank of England and the Swiss National Bank, have been key sellers of gold over this period.[19] In 2014, the agreement was extended another five years at 400 tonnes per year. In 2019 the agreement was not extended again.[citation needed]
Although central banks do not generally announce gold purchases in advance, some, such as Russia, have expressed interest in growing their gold reserves again as of late 2005.[citation needed] In early 2006, China, which only holds 1.3% of its reserves in gold,[20] announced that it was looking for ways to improve the returns on its official reserves. Some bulls hope that this signals that China might reposition more of its holdings into gold, in line with other central banks. Chinese investors began pursuing investment in gold as an alternative to investment in the Euro after the beginning of the Eurozone crisis in 2011. China has since become the world's top gold consumer as of 2013[update].[21]
The price of gold can be influenced by a number of macroeconomic variables.[22] Such variables include the price of oil, the use of quantitative easing, currency exchange rate movements and returns on equity markets.[22]
Gold, like all precious metals, may be used as a hedge against inflation, deflation or currency devaluation, though its efficacy as such has been questioned; historically, it has not proven itself reliable as a hedging instrument.[25] A unique feature of gold is that it has no default risk.[26] As Joe Foster, portfolio manager of the New York-based Van Eck International Gold Fund, explained in September 2010:
In recent years the recycling of second-hand jewelry has become a multibillion-dollar industry. The term "Cash for Gold" refers to offers of cash for selling old, broken, or mismatched gold jewelry to local and online gold buyers.
When dollars were fully convertible into gold via the gold standard, both were regarded as money. However, many people preferred to carry around paper banknotes rather than the somewhat heavier and less divisible gold coins. If people feared their bank would fail, a bank run might result. This happened in the USA during the Great Depression of the 1930s, leading President Roosevelt to impose a national emergency and issue Executive Order 6102 outlawing the "hoarding" of gold by US citizens. There was only one prosecution under the order, and in that case the order was ruled invalid by federal judge John M. Woolsey, on the technical grounds that the order was signed by the President, not the Secretary of the Treasury as required.[31]
The most traditional way of investing in gold is by buying bullion gold bars. In some countries, like Canada, Austria, Liechtenstein and Switzerland, these can easily be bought or sold at the major banks. Alternatively, there are bullion dealers that provide the same service. Bars are available in various sizes. For example, in Europe, Good Delivery bars are approximately 400 troy ounces (12 kg).[32] 1 kilogram (32.2 ozt) bars are also popular, although many other weights exist, such as the 10 ozt (310 g), 1 ozt (31 g), 10 g, 100 g, 1 kg, 1 Tael (50 g in China), and 1 Tola (11.3 g). 041b061a72