Lots of people over the last decade have gotten into the gold market.
As the traditional paper currencies have fluctuated, and as the stock market as a whole has slid downwards (sometimes slowly, sometimes incredibly quickly) it's become apparent to many people that there has to be a better place to invest their money and a better way to hold their value.
For many of these people, they found the answer they were looking for in gold- and were richly rewarded with massive increases in the value of their investments.
Now, for everyone who invested in gold there were many other people who were interested in investing in precious metals, or felt that investing in gold might be a good idea, but who didn't actually take the plunge.
There are a lot of reasons for this, but they mostly come down to one big idea- most people don't know how to invest in gold.
Obviously everyone knows how to go to a jeweler and buy a ring, and most people are aware that you can always pick up pieces of gold (coins, etc.
) at specialty shops and pawn shops, most people aren't aware of how to treat gold like an investment and how to buy and sell it with the same convenience that they can buy and sell stocks.
Here's a quick rundown on how to do just that.
First you have to decide whether you are going to buy gold in the moment (things like coins and bars) or whether you are going to buy gold futures.
A future is nothing more than agreeing to pay the current price of gold sometime in the future, banking on the idea that the price of gold will go up and you will get essentially at a discount.
Of course, this is risky because if the price goes down you will lose money on the transaction.
Next, you want to open up a standard brokerage account to trade your gold from.
For the most part, you're going to want to make sure that you sign up with a discount brokerage, because the price of gold doesn't necessarily fluctuate by great amounts in the short term.
If you are going to be buying and selling gold regularly, than it's important to minimize your trading costs to maximize the small margins of profit you will be earning with each transaction.
Finally, you just need to study the price of gold and gold futures.
In general there are fewer factors that affect the price of gold than the price of other investments (like stocks) so it's easier to successfully track in the short term.
If you are looking to purchase gold as a long term investment, than it doesn't matter quite as much what price you buy it at.
But if you are looking to treat your gold investment almost like day trading, than it's important that you closely track the fluctuations of the market, learning its patterns and learning to predict the next highs and lows to maximize your investment.