Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Recycled Gold: A Hot New Investment Strategy

Away from Wall Street and the stock market, investment professionals understand that although they can spread their bets across sectors and industries it is hard to distance oneself from the overall economic climate of a country. That is of course unless you invest in commodities such as gold. The reason for this is that gold, like currency has the same value anywhere around the world, and a value that is generally immune from economic forces such as interest rates and employment. The use of recycled gold is not just for jewelry as many amateurs believe. Gold is used in many products, such as satellites for example, because of the unique qualities that it has. Gold is naturally corrosion resistant; however it is also very soft. This makes gold an ideal candidate for being used as an alloy or compound where its qualities can be mixed with another metals to yield strong results. For those reasons, as well as its aesthetic qualities, gold is always needed and its price is generally affected by both supply and demand alone. The reason for this is that it is needed in countries around the world, so only an overall drop in the world’s economy can have an affect.

Because gold is heavily commoditized, this means that scrap gold has a value based on the weight of gold that you have. For example, an old necklace made of gold does not just have value in terms of what someone may pay for the necklace. It also has value in terms of what someone would be willing to pay for the weight of gold that it is made of. For those reasons alone, pawn brokers and cash day advance companies are happy to give gold a value, without being worried about their ability to resell it in jewelry form. You see, gold is also a highly liquid market. What does this mean? Well when a stock broker buys shares in a company he does not just consider value based factors, he also considers how liquid a stock is. This mean, how often it is traded. A stock which is not traded very often will usually be much more difficult to sell when it comes to a time that one would need too. Because gold is bought and sold all the time, there is never any difficulty in being able to sell it.
For those reasons and more, businesses and high net worth individuals have invested in gold for the past 5000 years. Now buying recycled gold can have more value because an individual can pay less for the gold, because of the perceived cost and inconvenience of turning it back into pure form. That is where the market is, and as something which can be sold easily it is a business which is easy to scale when you have all the fundamentals in place. It is also the case that because everyone is not aware of the commoditized and liquid market that exists, people you are buying from might not know how easy it will be for you to make money they could otherwise make.

No comments: