Throughout history, gold has been a popular hedge against inflation, economic crises, currency fluctuation and even war. And gold still remains a relevant investment for today’s investors.
In this episode, Hugo CEO and Co-founder David Fergusson sat down with Nicole and Priscilla at The Simple Sum to discuss the importance of investing in gold, bust some myths about gold, how you can invest in gold, and whether Bitcoin really is “digital gold”.
(Related article: How To Invest In Gold — Hugo On The Simple Sum)
We’ve transcribed the podcast for your convenience.
The Simple Sum podcast with CEO David Fergusson
The Simple Sum: Hi everyone! This episode is brought to you by Hugo. Hugo is a digital account that helps you spend, save and invest starting with gold, so you can start growing your wealth in small, easy steps. Hugo’s Gold Vault provides gold investors with a highly liquid, accessible and safe way for everyone to invest in physical gold. You can buy or sell gold from as low as 1 cent easily on the Hugo app. Download the Hugo app on the Apple App Store or Google Play, or to learn more about Hugo, visit www.hugosave.com. Before we get into the episode, we’d just like to take a moment to let you know that while we talk about investing in the episode, it is only for informational purposes. And what we talk about should not be taken as financial advice. As with all investments, please do your research to understand the risks involved before jumping in.
Priscilla: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of “Keep It Simple”. And today I’m joined by Nicole.
Nicole: Hello!
Priscilla: Nice to have you here finally.
Nicole: Yes. Thank you very much. I’m excited!
Priscilla: So today we’ll be talking about gold investing.
Nicole: Yes, that’s exciting!
Priscilla: So what are we going to do about gold investing, right? Does anyone know how to invest in gold nowadays?
Nicole: Yeah, I think maybe what we’ll be going into today more so is, you know, what is goal investing? How to get started investing in gold? Maybe some misconceptions or some thoughts that people might have about gold that we might address in today’s episode? So yeah, it’s like Gold 101, I guess.
Priscilla: Yeah, I think I would personally find that super useful because I know nothing about buying gold as an investment. I just think about gold bars and I get excited already!
Nicole: You know, you’re like all bling-bling-ed out, right? It’s not just going to be me and Pris today talking about gold. We also have a guest that is going to be somewhat of an expert on gold and gonna be teaching us a little bit more about it. With us today, we have David Fergusson. So David is actually from Hugo and he is actually the CEO and co-founder of Atlas Consolidated Pte Ltd, which is the company that owns the Hugo brand. David, maybe you would like to introduce yourself to our listeners.
David: I mean, I’ve spent about 27-odd years in the investments world. I started off life as an investment banker, so I was an equity analyst as well. About 12 years ago, I took over a family company that was Nimoi (Nee-mwah) and we’ve built a number of businesses below Nimoi. And Atlas Consolidated/Hugo is the latest till today.
Nicole: Thanks so much, David, for the introduction and for coming on to our podcast, to talk a little bit more about gold. Maybe first, what we’ll get into is sharing our own experiences with investing and perhaps investing in gold and some of our own thoughts about it. Yeah, so Pris, do you want to share with us, what are your thoughts on gold?
Priscilla: For me, my experience of investing is mainly buying stocks, buying some ETFs, some growth stocks and a little bit of crypto when I’m feeling spicy! [laughter] But, I’ve never thought about buying gold because no one in my circle talks about gold at all. And, I think the most recent event that would make me think about an investment in gold is my wedding. So, during a Chinese wedding, the custom is to give the bride this thing called “si dian jin”—so it’s four pieces of gold jewellery. So usually, people would either keep it as an investment—it’s usually pure gold, and then later sell it if, let’s say, you need to…
Nicole: But isn’t it more of sentimental value?
Priscilla: It is more sentimental valued, but some, I don’t know… For me, I would look at it in a very practical sense. I don’t really care how good it looks, but of course, if I can I want to keep it forever for the sentimental value.
Nicole: I’m not sure whether your in-laws will be happy to hear that you say you don’t really care…
Priscilla: I mean, that is the stance that I thought that my parents had also: it was more for investment rather than to wear outside because it can be quite elaborate, you know? There’s no casual gold necklace (you can wear) to buy groceries. Do you know what I mean?
Nicole: Right? Yeah. Okay, cool.
David: Well, I mean, it’s a very interesting thing that now virtually every culture in the world has something similar. So whether it’s in this part of the world, you have mas kahwin, they call it in Malaysia and Indonesia—the same thing. Indians do a similar sort of thing. The origins of your wedding ring in European cultures are exactly the same thing. And that in effect, what it is, is the gifting of something of great value to a young woman as she moves into a different part of her life. So that there’s some inherent sense of protection there. And that’s the key thing about gold—over time, it always offers you that sense of protection because gold is not like anything else; gold is not making any more of it. That thing will hold its value over time. And the people who give gold know that. That’s why they do it.
Nicole: Yeah. Well, I think that’s a great point that you make, David, because I think one of the things that I’m thinking about—so I have some experience investing, more than maybe Pris, and so some of the things that kind of go through my process of investment/process of my investment methodology—is, “Does it fit into some of the goals that I want to achieve?” And so I never really thought of gold as an investment, mainly because I was already thinking about stocks and bonds, like the 60/40 portfolio. And I think it is something that our audience has also kind of mentioned. So we actually did ask our audience what are their thoughts on gold. And some of the things that they mentioned is that they feel like it’s a bit out of fashion, but I know from what we know of you, you’ve mentioned before gold has never really gone out of fashion.
David: Well, look, I mean, what we’re talking about here with your wedding gold and that type of stuff. I mean, that’s the most old-fashioned, the most traditional of concepts in the history of the world. But gold is obviously much more than that. Gold, for thousands of years, has served as the basis of our system of money. And whether it’s the Lydian Kings in Turkey 3,500-4,000 years ago, through to the Roman empire, through to the earliest parts of the Chinese civilisation, through… I mean, all the way through, money has been underpinned by gold in some way, shape or form. Now that hasn’t been the case for about 50 years now. And we’ve talked about this publicly from our company about the end of Bretton Woods.
Nicole: Maybe you can elaborate a little bit more for our audience, what exactly is Bretton Woods for their financial basics.
David: So Bretton Woods was the latest or last incarnation of a formal underpinning of the global currency system with gold. So you traditionally have the classic gold standard, which was followed by the gold exchange standard after the first world war and the collapse of the classic gold standard. And then that gold exchange standard collapsed, frankly, heading into the second world war. Yeah. So, the US dollar is pegged to gold at a set price. It was US$35, more or less (I think, can’t remember exactly). And then every other currency was pegged to the US dollar and it worked well for a while. But like all currency systems, comes under stress when people are not necessarily responsible with that currency, which basically means governments should not just borrow money willy-nilly. And, the US dollar came under significant pressure in the early 1970s, when, towards the end of the Vietnam war, it came off the gold standard at that point. And since that point, we’ve had a free-floating US dollar that’s been based around the system of currency in the United States and the gold price has floated freely. So gold has gradually increased in value and value and value for years and years and years because they’ve been printing US dollars for years and years and years.
Nicole: Yeah. Maybe just a bit of like… because that’s a great point that you brought up, so maybe for the benefit of our audience, to summarise what David had said, the US dollar or the currency was actually pegged to gold. So how much gold reserves you have, that’s the amount of money that you could print.
David: That’s exactly right, in effect. I mean, there are monetary mechanics and lots of jargon around this, but in effect, that is a perfect summation of it.
Nicole: Great. And then, because there’s only a limited amount of gold, that wasn’t very sustainable for the currencies…
David: You couldn’t print money. I mean, that was the key thing. You had a firm supply of money, but you couldn’t print it. Now, ever since then, we’ve been printing money like drunken sailors. And so last year, the base money in the United States increased from about 14 trillion to about 22 trillion. Now, inherently, it’s difficult for people to grasp because large numbers frighten people. And so they sit there and they go, “Oh, Christ, what does that mean? Oh, well, how do I understand this?” Now, it’s very easy to explain. Everybody has played the game of Monopoly. So they all know how to play: you choose the boot—I personally prefer it to be the top hat—and then we go around the board. What happens throughout the game is property prices go up in value. Why do they go up in value?
Nicole: Because you get more money throughout the game.
David: Exactly. That’s exactly right. And so the increase in money and in the game drives up the prices of property. The inherent utility of that property doesn’t change. And that’s exactly what’s happened. And of course, the last few years is that money’s being printed.
Nicole: So basically what you were explaining just now was inflation. So as more money is being printed, then things become more expensive. So the question that I have is then: Why does, when currency value goes down, gold price goes up? What’s actually causing that?
David: There are lots of features that determine the price of gold. The quantity theory of gold, or quantity theory of money and the relationship with gold, is the one that we’ve been talking about just now. Frankly, if you print more money, the value of gold goes up over the long term. And that’s the most important thing for most of your listeners: is that if you’re going to hold gold, hold it for the long-term and you will be rewarded with the protection of value for the long term. Now that’s why most people should hold gold. But look, in the intervening period, there’re a lot of gyrations in the price of gold—they go up and down this volatility and gold is a volatile asset. Now what causes that volatility is, typically, Fear. So gold is a fascinating asset for a portfolio in the sense that it’s genuinely a non-correlated asset, which basically means that it tends to move independently of every other asset in your portfolio. Where you see risks going up, your equity portfolio will get hit. Your bond portfolio will get hit, but your gold portfolio will go up.
Nicole: Yeah. So essentially, one reason investors should probably have gold in their portfolio is because its value is not tied to any other asset class.
David: Tied is the wrong term – it’s not correlated. So it won’t be dragged down by other assets, you know? General levels of risk tend to push gold up.
Priscilla: That’s interesting because my concept of how the prices go up and down in gold is in times of uncertainty, for example, (during) COVID the prices of gold will go up because a lot of people are seeing it as a safe haven—it’s very stable—so that’s why people buy into gold a bit more.
David: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. And so look, people should think of gold as something they have in their portfolio and that it’s long-term insurance. And you know, you don’t want to… I mean, candidly, even as someone who basically sells gold through various different businesses of mine, I don’t want to tell you to put all your money in gold—it’s a bad idea. But you should always have some, right? Because you know, you’re going to really, really want it when everything else in your portfolio goes down. Because that happens sometimes. But when it does, gold will usually go up.
Nicole: Yeah. And I think also like, oh, one other thing that I think I’ve read before is that even though we no longer use the gold standard, they (currencies or central banks) still keep gold as reserves. China, I think keeps… We don’t know how much gold they are keeping but I know they have gold reserves in China.
David: Yeah. There’s an old expression that relates to gold, and it says, everybody lies. Everybody lies, but gold tells the truth. And so central banks may tell you that gold is a useless yellow metal with no purpose, but somehow or rather, they seem to be quite insistent that they keep hold of theirs. And more importantly, over the course of the last 20 years, as some levels of confidence in the US dollar have declined, central banks around the world have increased their gold holdings. You’ve mentioned China. We have no idea how much gold China has as a country, but we know it’s a lot. And I mean A LOT. Because China mines more gold than anyone else in the world. And if you ask a gold refiner in Switzerland, where the major gold refiners often are, if they’ve ever seen a Chinese gold bar, they’ll tell you no, because that mined gold never leaves the country.
Priscilla: How do you tell whether it’s a Chinese gold bar? Haha, I’m sorry! [laughter]
David: Well, each refiner will stamp the gold.
Nicole: How do you know it’s “Made In China”? [laughter]
David: That’s funny. People fake a lot of things around gold and things around the manufacturing world, but at the moment “Made in China” isn’t necessarily the one that they fake.
Nicole: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I just find that quite ironic.
Priscilla: It’s reverse psychology, you see, “This can’t be real gold!” And then it’s real. How do you predict how much gold will grow over the years?
David: In terms of price?
Nicole: Yeah, in terms of price. Because everyone can say that gold will eventually be more expensive in the future. Right?
David: Yeah. I mean, it’s certainly an art, not a science, valuing gold. And you know, the one thing that I’ll say about every gold price prediction is that it’s likely to be wrong. And I’ve made many, many predictions on the prices of gold in my life. And I will say categorically none of them has been right. But what I’ll say is that it has a finite supply. Gold grows maybe 2% a year because of the amount they mine it, or less than that—1.5% a year—as a result of the amount they mine. And that finite supply basically can be compared against all of the other money, all of the other financial instruments in the world that issue enormous amounts each year. But whether it’s central banks printing money or companies issuing shares or bonds or governments issuing bonds, there’s an enormous amount of supply and that increase in supply tends to gradually push up the price of gold. So it being a natural hedge is the way to look at it.
Nicole: Right. I think you brought up an interesting point. In terms of other assets, there’s always a way to issue more bonds or issue more shares and print more money. But there’s one thing, I think, a lot of people in recent years have mentioned, for example, Bitcoin. We can’t run away from cryptocurrency, but there has been this thing that people say that Bitcoin is the new gold or the digital gold. And one of the reasons they kind of say that is because of the idea that Bitcoin is of limited supply.
David: Look, cryptocurrencies are absolutely fascinating. And candidly, I LOVE the concept of the private sector creating money, but the thing about cryptocurrency, and again, cryptocurrencies are a number of things. You know, they are a currency, they are a transfer of value, they are a store of value, they are a payment system… There are a whole load of different things wrapped up there. Not that I think Bitcoin is particularly valuable. I mean, it’s an unanchored currency. It doesn’t have any backing to the currency, and I think that’s an important thing for a currency, but it does have a finite supply. So you can’t print it. It’s not going to sort of just expand and destroy its value that way, but it doesn’t have anything underpinning it. Now, other cryptocurrencies such as the so-called stablecoins that may be backed by a commodity or something else, they’re fascinating! You know, their fascinating way of trying to combine this revolutionary technology with old-fashioned assets. And I think that offers a pretty significant future for gold.
Nicole: Right. So I guess maybe for the retail investor, they can look at gold as being the low-risk side of their portfolio, whereas the crypto, or maybe Bitcoin, being the higher risk side of their portfolio, perhaps. But both are kind of like, future-proofing your money or assets, right? Because you never really know crypto, how it’s going to be adopted in the future and whether or not it will be something that countries will actually move towards, or people will move towards.
David: I think if you were to draw lessons from the past, new technologies take a lot of time to bed down, but very old-fashioned things will take a long time to die if they’re ever going to. Now, you know, people often say, “Well, the end of gold is nigh.” They said it after the end of Bretton Woods, “Oh, well, gold’s gone now. No one needs it any longer.” And they said that when gold was $30 to $35 an ounce, it’s now $1800 more or less, right? Now, people who sold their gold at $35 an ounce 50 years ago will be feeling fairly foolish about that. So gold will hold its value. It’ll stay there. It’ll be there. It’ll be there over the long term. I think if you’re looking at it relative to cryptocurrencies and your portfolio, it’s a completely different thing.
Priscilla: What you said just now about, last time people were like, “Oh, gold is dying!” They have a lot of gold bars kept with them. It’s like what you said, right?
Nicole: Yeah, they’re probably just lying…
Priscilla: “Oh gold is not in fashion anymore. You should just let go of your gold at a low price to ME and then I can keep it.”
Nicole: Yeah… On that note though, like, so there are different types of gold investments that are available today. So you’ve got the physical gold bar and gold jewellery, like what Pris mentioned earlier. Then we also have gold mining companies, gold stocks. And then we got like gold ETFs that track, you know, a particular goal index. So what should an investor consider when thinking about the different vehicles?
David: So I think from a sort of conceptual basis, you start with physical gold being the centre point, and then the further away you get from that, typically, the looser, your investment will perform to gold itself—the gold price. Now, gold, your physical gold and bars can be a little bit clunky and they’re just not available or easily available to the average person. A bank bar, which is the typical traded format in the London bullion market, is about 400 ounces—it’s about US$750,000. Now the average person can’t afford to do that. The kilobar, which is the ubiquitous trading instrument in Asia, that’s about $60,000. Again, US dollars this is by the way, not Singapore dollars. This is beyond what most people can simply afford to do.
Priscilla: Can I buy a nugget or something? I just really want to hold it, you know?
Nicole: Maybe they’ll do a gold viewing or something.
Priscilla: No, but I want to hold it. I want to look at it. Sometimes at night, I’ll look at it and then feel safe before I go to sleep.
David: So you joke. But honestly, when people are very sort of anti-gold as an investment, the best thing that we can do is show them a bar, have them hold it, and almost invariably, they look at it and go, “Oh, this is cool!” Because it is cool!
Nicole: Yeah. It’s like those people who, you know, before they get a dog, they’re like, “No, I don’t want a dog.” And then you put a puppy in their hands, and they’ll go “Awww…”
Priscilla: Um, I find it funny that you (David) think I’m joking because I really want to hold a…
David: I don’t think you are joking! Honestly, that response is very common, right? When people touch it, they understand its value. You just inherently understand it.
Priscilla: It’s instinctual, it’s almost primal to want to keep it. I’m sure there was a caveman one day, “This is worth 10 cows.” He just picked it off the ground, “Guys, look at this shiny thing. Don’t you want to trade your 10 cows for this?” And then, he went home with 10 cows!
Nicole: And then that’s how it all started. NOW, we’re really joking.
David: You can joke. But I mean, realistically, that’s not too far off what actually happened. Look at big bank bars, kilos bars, they’re all very expensive. For the average guy who’s thinking, “Well, you know, I’m kind of interested in this,” and he doesn’t want to do something that is a technology solution like ours, then going down to the bank and buying a gold coin is the way to do that. If you buy half an ounce, that’ll cost you a thousand Singapore dollars or a little bit over a thousand Singapore dollars, and you will touch that and play with it and guarantee you’ll learn more about gold as a result of having it.
Nicole: So we’ve heard about people actually trying to earn on the spread of buying a physical gold bar at its spot price, right?
David: So yeah. Look, I mean that’s a reasonable thing to happen in order to create liquidity in the market. Someone who’s buying physical gold and selling physical gold needs to take that spread in between the buying and selling. And that’s not an unreasonable thing to do. When you’re moving physical gold around, that becomes a higher cost. That’s just something embedded into the market, but when you use an electronic service like ours, it’s incredibly inexpensive. So it’s not something that one needs to worry about. When you start getting into the gold bar territory or the gold coin territory, then, things are quite different. So a gold coin will typically be sold at a 4% or 5% premium to the spot price for the manufacturing of the coin, for the distribution network the coins have to go through. So those things are sort of slightly different. And candidly, we would probably tell most people unless they have a specific interest in holding the sort of gold bar/gold coin for reasons like you just talked about before—you’d like to touch it and feel it…
Priscilla: Just self-happiness!
David: You know, then you probably want to steer clear of it because the electronic version will give you everything that you need, except for the kind of…
Nicole: Being able to touch it and feel it…
David: …the tactile component to it. On the physical gold side, you can buy coins/bars. They are very, very liquid if you have access to the market, but candidly, they can be quite expensive to trade if you don’t. And most people don’t. Again, innovation in finance always happens. So, you know, then you get to solutions like ours where, when you buy gold across Hugo, you’re not buying a futures contract, you’re not buying a share in anything. You’re buying fractional gold that’s allocated to you—it’s your gold; we can’t take it from you. But if we could take it from you, we’d steal it. But realistically, it’s not ours. There’s no counterparty risk between it. It’s your gold. We don’t have the same relationship with your gold that your bank has with your money. So when you deposit money in a bank, you have a claim on the bank. If the bank goes bust outside Singapore, where banks… In Singapore, it’s very unlikely to have banks go bust, but outside Singapore, it’s not that uncommon. And if your deposits are in the bank, and it goes bust, well, you’re in trouble. But if we were to go bust, God forbid, which I don’t think we’re going to do, but if we were, then that gold would still be yours. It’s never ours; it’s a very important distinction. And so we’ve removed that level of counterparty risk from the equation. We’ve done it through the use of technology. Sensibly, the thing that you should do if you have gold is to keep it in a safe and insure it. Now, that’s actually a tedious process. So we do that, of course, so all the gold that’s held with us is held in secure vaults and insured.
Priscilla: Previously, we did an episode about diamonds and how they have man-made diamonds, right? What if one day they figure out how to manufacture gold?
Nicole: Is this something that people can do or people are looking into doing?
David: Alchemy, yes. So people have been looking and trying to work out how to make gold for a lot of years. But actually, you can theoretically make gold. But it’s an incredibly expensive process and it involves basically changing the fundamental structure of atoms, which we have within our capability. But I would imagine it’s not… not imagine, but it’s just a lot cheaper to dig it out of the ground. So we’re not going to be doing that anytime soon.
Nicole: I think diamonds are made of different elements. I’m not sure… This is like uneducated guessing right now, but I’m pretty sure… Yeah, carbon, right? Okay, carbon. Yes, yes. Science! And then gold is technically an element also, which is…
David: It’s not “technically”, it IS an element.
Nicole: It is, it is. Ag, Ag, I remember…
David: No… Au.
Nicole: Au! Oh good God… This is why I am doing finance and not science.
Priscilla: Is Ag, at the risk of sounding stupider, silver?
David: Yes it is.
Priscilla: Thank you!!! [laughter]
Nicole: So I guess I’m the stupid one! What we’ve covered just now was mostly about gold’s value in the market, in the economy and how it’s uncorrelated with other assets and things like that. But what about for the average Singaporean investor? Who should be considering gold and why?
David: Okay. So firstly, EVERYONE should have some gold. No one should have none. This is the critical thing. And by the way, when I talk at conferences or when I speak at investment forums and I ask the room full of people, “Who has any gold?” Less than 5% will put their hand up. So most people have none and they’re taking a risk that they don’t need to take. So what we tell people is that you should have somewhere between 3% and 5% of your portfolio in gold and that will give you some degree of protection. But more importantly, it will smooth out the volatility of your overall portfolio because of the non-correlated nature of gold, which allows you to take more risk elsewhere and therefore get more return. So it’s about 3% to 5% is what we tell people. But candidly, have some. That’s the key thing—just any form of gold exposure is better than none. Over time, over different parts of your life, the recommendations would be different. And I would say that for the younger investors, they should have more, but only because that allows them to have greater exposure to equities.
Nicole: Right. Because if you’re holding more gold then you can take more risks and the volatility wouldn’t make you feel super uncomfortable. But then I guess maybe because young people also, I think it’s a consideration. I guess like for you, Pris, you have only certain limited savings. So is that something that you can kind of build over time?
David: Well, that’s the very important thing about gold is that you should never buy gold once, you should buy it over time because it is volatile, it does move up and down. And the critical thing is you want to capture the long-term average price because that long-term average goes upwards. Period. And so that’s what you’re looking to capture. So, the smart move—honestly, and this is one of the reasons why we built this into Hugo—is to invest $10 a month, or $10 a week, or $100 a month, or $100 a week or something in gold. So it goes in, after month, after month, after month, after month, after month, and you will capture the average and you will capture the long-term trend at that point, and you’ll do it while evening out your pricing and not being impacted by the volatility too dramatically. So that is a very, very smart thing to do. But candidly, that’s what you should be doing with everything as well. Like, I mean, you are, sadly for me, much younger than I am. And your juncture in life, the critical thing is to do a little, often, early. And just do it. And it’s that concept of putting a certain amount away every month that will make a huge difference to your safety over the long term.
Priscilla: I think, for me, the reason… I think it’s quite interesting that you say to put $10, $50, $100 every month into gold. I think that’s interesting because my misconception was that gold is really expensive to buy at one time because I don’t know any young person who owns that casual gold coin.
Nicole: Yeah. So I think now, because of technology and different ways that you can kind of own fractionally, that allows you to be able to put in bit by bit over time.
Priscilla: But even for digital investments into gold, I don’t really hear anyone of my age group talking about it. When we talk about owning gold it’s usually my parents’ generation that owns gold in a safe, so that’s why my impression of gold is that you can’t just put in a hundred dollars into gold. Yeah.
Nicole: But now that you know that though, does that change things for you?
Priscilla: Yeah, definitely! Because I think it’s not such a huge commitment, you know what I mean? For me, with limited liquid funds that I can spend on investments, buying a $60,000 gold bar does not seem financially responsible for me.
David: And you’re right. It probably isn’t for you. The smart thing for you is probably to put aside, $10 or $50 a month into gold. But that’s probably the smart move.
Nicole: Yeah. And I think like what David said that that’s just something that you should do with all of your investments and all of your savings anyways. So it’s just now building the habit of maybe one more asset class in your portfolio. Yeah. Okay. We have one more question, David: What are some things that people have to look out for when they’re buying physical gold?
David: Okay. You have to look out for the con artists. There are con artists around and they… You know, gold is a specific medium that they like to look after or they like to get involved in. So there are a few truths to gold—You can never, ever, ever buy gold at a discount; gold will never ever give you a fixed return.
Nicole: So, no Black Friday sale? [laughter]
David: Jewellery at a discount is a different thing. But if someone tells you that they’ve got a scheme whereby you can buy a certain amount of gold at a discount to the market price, it’s just not true! We come across these cons often and quite often it’s heartbreaking, but people who are not familiar with these cons fall for them. Now, there was a very famous con in Singapore as well that happened about eight/nine years ago: a business offered a scheme where they guaranteed to repurchase your gold at a higher price and you would get an implied interest rate of 10% to 12% if you were to buy that gold. It was a con and the whole thing was a Ponzi scheme that fell to pieces. They’ve only just now sent a couple of people to jail for it. But if anyone tells you that you’re going to make a fortune out of investing in gold, they’re lying. Gold offers you safety, offers you security, offers you long-term protection against inflation, but it will not make you rich.
Priscilla: So it’s too good to be true, right? And that goes for a lot of other investments and schemes…
Nicole: Okay. So yes, if someone says that you can become a millionaire with gold, they’re probably lying. Okay. Thanks so much, David, for educating us on gold. I think we learnt quite a lot of things, and kind of dispelled some misconceptions about what we thought were truths about gold, but it wasn’t. And, thank you so much for joining us today!