Recently gold prices touched almost $1200 per troy ounce breaching the historical barrier. Many people only think of stock as a way to invest. Recently people have also talking about currency trading. How about gold trading? In this article, I will show you how you can invest in gold. Gold investing can hedge your investment portfolio. Gold prices are expected to do much better in 2010. Though, you cannot rule out a temperary retracement but the trend in gold prices has been up for many years now. Now, gold is a commodity. Unlike other commodities like crude oil, coal, cotton, soybean, coffee, pork bellies or live cattle, you can easily store gold. Gold in storage over time appreciates in value. So one of the best ways to invest in gold is to buy it directly in shape of bars, bullions or even jewelry. You can wear gold jewelry and enjoy the status this gives while at the same time this gold jewelry can come handy when you want to sell it. You can even buy gold coins. Remember the time of yore, when gold coins used to be the universal currency. So direct investing in gold can be a good way to invest in gold. Now, try to invest in crude oil, coal, coffee, cotton or other commodities directly. First you will need a large storage hall for storing that commodity.
One of the easiest ways to invest in gold is to buy gold coins. Gold coins are better than gold bars as you can buy or sell them in smaller units. Most popular gold coins are the Gold Eagle (issued by the US Government), Gold Maple Leaf (issued by the Royal Canadian Mint) and Gold Krugerrand (issued by South African government).
As said before, people especially women love gold jewelry. Apart from that you can buy gold certificates. These are hybrid certificates that gives you the ownership of gold but you don't have to take physical possession of your gold. Gold is stored in a safe location by the company, firm or the authority that issued the certificate.
Trading gold futures contract is what I like. Futures trading is interesting. You can profit from the volatility in the underlying assets. Gold futures is one of the direct methods to profit from the volatility in the gold market. But you need to know how to trade futures contracts if you want to do it. Futures trading is not difficult. There are some differences as compared to stock trading but you can learn futures trading by paper trading it first. The most popular futures contract is the COMEX Gold Futures. These futures contracts get traded on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX). COMEX Gold Futures are the most liquid gold contracts in the world. There are some traders who are specialists in trading gold futures.
The other is the CBOT Mini-Gold. This contract gets traded on CBOT and is popular for its smaller size that allows many retail investors to profit from the gold market plus you can trade it electronically on the CBOT electronic trading platform. Now many investors don't want to mess around with gold futures! For them, Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) offer a good investment opportunity in gold. There are two gold ETFs to choose from. One is the StreetTracks Gold Shares. This fund is a good way to profit from gold without actually owning it. The other gold ETF is iShares COMEX Gold Trust. Now both these ETFs track the gold prices in the spot market making their performance almost identical most of the time.
But if you have been trading stocks for a long time, you might still love to invest in some good gold mining companies by purchasing their stocks. There are many gold mining companies. When the gold prices soar, naturally their stock prices soar with them. Newmont Mining Corporation is the largest gold mining company in the world if I am not wrong. In any case, it is definately one of the largest if not the largest. So there are many ways you can invest in gold!
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