What's the Difference Between These Gold ETFs?
GLD and IAU are pretty much exactly the same thing. If you run performance over the long term, they're giving you exposure to gold spot. Now, if you care about how the gold is being sourced, they're both being housed in London.
One has HSBC as a custodian, that's GLD, and the other one has JP Morgan. They're pretty much the same thing. I think a lot of investors don't necessarily, not that they don't care, they don't get into that level of depth. They're both obviously secured by actual gold in the vaults.
The GDX, which is the Van product, that's a completely different animal. That's gold mining stocks. The only reason I'm going to screen out GDX is I think if you're going to be buying gold, a lot of times you want to buy it as a hedge or some sort of uncorrelated assets.
When you have GDX and stocks, you're obviously much more correlated to the market. So this one's basically kind of a tie to be honest because they're really doing the same exact thing. They're both giving you really good efficient exposure to gold spot. It's better than the futures-based product. So, really a tie for me between GLD and IAU.
