What are the best ways to buy gold? That's what we'll explain on this page.

We'll show you how professionals have arranged the world gold market so that they can deal physical bullion gold much cheaper and much more safely than you.

Then we'll show you how you can participate in their professional market.

To do that we'll introduce you to BullionVault. We'll also tell you about the other ways you might choose to buy gold : i.e. coins and small bars, ETFs, certificates, gold futures and mining stocks. When you've understood these alternatives we're sure you'll have even more confidence you're making the right choice with BullionVault.

More than 100,000 people from 83 countries use BullionVault.

In the last two years they bought more gold through BullionVault than through any other direct bullion ownership service in the world.

BullionVault now stores over 16 tonnes of gold, which is much more than most of the world's central banks. Every ounce is owned privately, by people like you, and stored in the accredited professional bullion market vault of their choice, in London, Zurich or New York.

OK then? Now you know you're not wasting your valuable time let's get on with understanding how the professional gold market works, and how BullionVault.com lets you use it.

 

 

Gold Bars, Good Delivery, and the Professional Gold Market

• The most competitive gold prices in the world, the ones you see published in the papers and on the internet, are enjoyed by the participants in the professional bullion market:- gold dealers, refiners, government agencies, bullion banks and the occasional big investment organization.

• This professional market only deals in what are known as Good Delivery bars. If you're not trading these bars you are excluded, both from their market and from their very competitive prices, which means you'll pay more when you buy and receive less when you sell.

Fine gold is 100% pure gold

• Good Delivery bars are cast by a small group of precious metal refiners accredited by the professional bullion dealing communities in London, New York and Zurich. They are accurately assayed and guaranteed always 99.5% pure gold or better. The market trades their pure gold content (gross bar weight x purity) which is known as fine gold, so no-one who trades professional market bullion ever pays for impurities.

Retain high bullion integrity in a professional vault

• Good Delivery bars have high integrity because they have never been in private possession. From the day they're first manufactured they are kept in bullion vaults recognized and monitored by the local gold dealing community. Every time bars are moved - by accredited bullion couriers - a careful record is maintained, showing continuous storage through trusted hands. This guarantees gold bar integrity in a way that keeping gold at home, or even in safety deposit boxes, simply cannot match.

• The result is that a professional buyer's vault will accept deliveries of these bars direct from the seller's vault without re-checking their purity. The seller gets paid quickly and efficiently, and bullion trading costs are much reduced for both buyer and seller. This is what Good Delivery bars are all about, and it's why the high volume, high integrity, professional bullion market is the only place where a sale of gold nets the seller the widely published bullion price.

• Good Delivery bars are large - usually 400 troy ounces each (12.4kg), and at $1,000 an ounce that's $400,000 a bar.

• Yet even having enough money to buy a whole bar or two only solves half the problem. You still need that key relationship with a formally recognized bullion vault to look after the gold while you own it. Otherwise your gold loses its guaranteed acceptance as 'Good Delivery', and cannot easily be sold at full price. But those vaults are ultra-cautious and typically don't deal with the general public. Even if you did spend the considerable time, cost and effort of setting up a vaulting account with one of them you'd find the minimum monthly storage fee means you'd need about 15 big bars of gold to get an economic rate for bar storage.

• These are the barriers which keep private users out of the professional bullion market.

Direct Access To The Best Gold Prices

• BullionVault.com changes all this. It enables people from all over the world to own professional market gold and keep it in any quantity in officially recognized bullion vaults in London (UK), New York (USA), or Zurich (Switzerland).

• All BullionVault gold is held in Good Delivery form. So when you come to sell, your buyer is able to trust the purity and weight of your gold, which is guaranteed by BullionVault itself, because we know that you never had the opportunity to corrupt it.

• Most people who buy gold don't stop to consider how important bullion integrity is going to be when they come to sell, but it will be critical to the price they get. Too much money is lost by gold investors who find out that lower integrity bullion has a higher premium and simply does not fetch the spot price when it is handed back over the counter. The round-trip dealing costs (i.e. buying and selling) for bullion coins and small bars is usually about 7% to 10%, and it stretched to 20% in late 2008.

• Your trading costs on BullionVault are much lower. When you buy or sell you pay a commission whose maximum rate is 0.8%, falling progressively when you invest above $30,000 to just 0.02%. The round-trip costs you 1.6% on small amounts, falling to an incredible 0.04% for larger customers.

• You can start buying gold in amounts as low as 1 gram which is much smaller than the smallest coin. There's no upper limit. You can deal thousands of ounces if you want to. In fact you should call us  if you want to deal more than 800 oz. We can save you even more money on orders of this size.

• Storage charges are very low too. BullionVault charges 0.12% pa ($4 per month minimum) with insurance included. That's less than a tenth of the storage fees charged by retail banks, and less than a third of the annual fees charged by typical exchange-traded gold funds, known as Gold ETFs. (We'll explain later how banks' use of allocated/unallocated gold causes them to grossly overcharge for bullion storage.)