GLD

Leveraged Bullion and Mining Funds to Cash in on the Gold Bonanza

Scott BuchananLeave a comment

Stocks (e.g., S&P 500) are up 12.5 % year to date. That is pretty good for 9.5 months. But gold has been way better, up 40%:

Fans of gold cite various reasons for why its price should and must keep going up (out of control federal debt and associated money-printing, de-dollarization by non-Western nations, buying by central banks, etc.). I have no idea if that is true. But if it is, that raises the question in my mind:  for the limited amount of funds I have to invest in gold, can I get more bang for my investing bucks, assuming gold continues to rise?

It turns out the answer is yes.  A straightforward way is to buy into a fund which is 2X or 3X leveraged to the price of gold. If gold goes up 10%, then such a fund will go up 20% or 30%. Let’s see how two such funds have done this year, UGL (a large 2X gold fund) and a newer, smaller 3X fund, SHNY:

Holy derivatives, Batman, that leverage really works! With GLD (1X gold) up 40%, UGL was up 80% year to date, and 3X SHNY is up 120%. So, your $10,000 would have turned into $24,000. The mighty S&P500 (blue line) looks rather pitiful in comparison.

But wait, there’s more. Let’s consider gold “streamers”, like WPM (Wheaton Precious Metals) or FNV. They give money to mines in return for a share of the production at fixed, discounted prices, so their cash flow soars when gold prices rise. Year to date, FNV is up 73%, while WPM is up 91%.

And then there are the gold miners themselves. They tend to have fairly fixed breakeven costs of production, currently around $1200-1400/oz.  Again, their profit margin rockets upward when gold prices get far above their breakeven:

Source

GDX is a large fund of representative mining stocks. For icing on the cake, there are funds that are 2X (NUGT) or 3X (GDXU) leveraged to the price changes in mining stocks. The final chart here displays their year-to-date performance in all their glory:

The blue S&P 500 line is lost in the noise, and even the orange 40% GLD line is left in the dust. The 1X miner fund was up 108%, the 2X fund NUGT was up 276%, and the 3X GDXU was up 506%. Your $10,000 would have turned into $51,000.

Of course, what goes up fast will also come down fast, since leverage works both ways. For instance, from Oct 21 to Dec 30, 2024, gold was down a mere 4%, but WPM was down 15%, the 1X gold miner GDX was down 20%, and 3X GDXU down an eye-watering 54%. That means that your $10,000 turned into $4,600 in two months. Imagine watching that unfold, and not panic-selling at the bottom. Gold fell by more than half between 2011 and 2015. If it fell by even 20% (i.e., gave up half of this year’s gains), I could see a 3X miner fund losing over 90% of its value (just a guess).

One more twist to mention here is the “stacked” fund GDMN, which uses derivatives to be long 1X gold PLUS 1X gold miners. It is up 151% this year, which is nearly four times as much as gold. This fund seems to have a nice combination of decent leverage with moderate volatility. It has on average kept pace with the 2X miner fund NUGT, with shallower dips. NUGT has surged way ahead in the past two months as miner stock prices have gone nuts, but that is somewhat exceptional.

Disclaimer: As usual, nothing here should be considered advice to buy or sell any security.

Warren Buffett Quotes on Gold as a Bad Investment; Was He Right?

Scott BuchananLeave a comment

To say Warren Buffett is not a fan of gold would be an understatement. His basic beef is that gold does not produce much of practical value.  His instincts have always been to buy businesses that generate steady and growing cash by producing goods or services that people need or want –  – businesses like railroads, beverage makers, and insurance companies.

Here are some quotes on the subject from the Oracle of Omaha, where I have bolded some phrases:

“Gold … has two significant shortcomings, being neither of much use nor procreative. True, gold has some industrial and decorative utility, but the demand for these purposes is both limited and incapable of soaking up new production. Meanwhile, if you own one ounce of gold for an eternity, you will still own one ounce at its end” — Buffett, letter to shareholders, 2011

“With an asset like gold, for example, you know, basically gold is a way of going long on fear, and it’s been a pretty good way of going long on fear from time to time. But you really have to hope people become more afraid in the year or two years than they are now. And if they become more afraid you make money, if they become less afraid you lose money. But the gold itself doesn’t produce anything” — Buffett, CNBC’s Squawk Box, 2011

This from when the world’s 67-cubic foot total gold hoard was worth about $7 trillion, which by his reckoning was the value of all U.S. farmland plus seven times the value of petroleum giant ExxonMobil plus an extra $1 trillion:

“And if you offered me the choice of looking at some 67-foot cube of gold … and the alternative to that was to have all the farmland of the country, everything, cotton, corn, soybeans, seven ExxonMobils. Just think of that. Add $1 trillion of walking around money. I, you know, maybe call me crazy but I’ll take the farmland and the ExxonMobils”  – – Cited in https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/3-things-warren-buffett-has-said-about-gold

And my favorite:

“Gold gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head“. – – From speech at Harvard, see https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/05/25/bury-gold/

One thing Buffett did NOT say is that gold is “barbarous relic”.  That line is owned by John Maynard Keynes from a hundred years ago, referring to the notion of tying national money issuance to the number of bars of gold held in the national vaults:

“In truth, the gold standard is already a barbarous relic. All of us, from the Governor of the Bank of England downwards, are now primarily interested in preserving the stability of business, prices, and employment, and are not likely, when the choice is forced on us, deliberately to sacrifice these to outworn dogma, which had its value once” –  Monetary Reform (1924)

Has Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Beaten Gold as an Investment?

 Given all that trash talk from the legendary investor, let’s see how an investment in his flagship Berkshire Hathaway company (stock symbol BRK.B) compares to gold over various time periods. I will use the ETF GLD as a proxy for gold, and will include the S&P 500 index as a proxy for the general U.S.  large cap stock market.

As always, these comparisons depend on your starting and ending points. In the 1990s and 2000s, BRK.B hugely outperformed the S&P 500, cementing Buffett’s reputation as one of the greatest investors of all time. (GLD data doesn’t go back that far).  In the past twelve months, gold (up 41%) has soundly beaten SPY (up 14 %) and completely trounced BRK.A (up 9%), as of last week. A couple of one-off factors have gone into these results: Gold had an enormous surge in January-April as the world markets digested the implications of never-ending gigantic U.S. budget deficits, and the markets soured on BRK.A due to the announced upcoming retirement of Buffett himself.

Stepping back to look over the past ten years shows the old master still coming out on top. In this plot, gold is orange, S&P 500 is blue, and BRK.A is royal purple:

Over most of this time period (through 7/21/2025), BRK.A and SP500 were pretty close, and gold lagged significantly. Gold was notably left behind during the key stock surge of 2021. Even with the rise in gold and dip in BRK.A this year, Buffett’s company (up 232%) still beats gold (198%) over the past ten years. BRK.A pulled well ahead of SP500 during the 2022 correction, and never gave back that lead. In the April stock market panic this year, BRK.A actually went up as everything else dropped, as it was seen as a tariff-proof safe haven. SP500 was ahead of gold for nearly all this period, until the crash in stocks and the surge in gold in the first half of 2025 brought them to essentially a tie for the past decade.

Central Banks Are Buying Gold; Should You?

Scott BuchananLeave a comment

Anyone who reads financial headlines knows that gold prices have soared in the past year. Why?

Gold has historically been a relatively stable store of value, and that role seems to be returning after decades of relative neglect. Official numbers show sharply increased buying by the world’s central banks, led by China, Poland, and Azerbaijan in early 2025. Russia, India and Turkey have also been major buyers. There is widespread conviction that actual gold purchases are appreciably higher than the officially-reported numbers, to side-step President Trump’s threatened extra tariffs on nations seen as de-dollarizing.

I think the most proximate cause for the sharp run-up in gold prices in the past twelve months has been the profligate U.S. federal budget deficit, under both administrations. This is convincing key world actors that the dollar will become increasingly devalued over time, no matter which party is in power. Thus, it is prudent to get out of dollars and dollar-denominated assets like U.S. T-bonds.

Trump’s erratic and offensive policies and statements in 2025 have added to the desire to diversify away from U.S. assets. This is in addition to the alarm in non-Western countries over the impoundment of Russian dollar-related assets in connection with the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. Also, there is something of a self-fulfilling momentum aspect to any asset: the more it goes up, the more it is expected to go up.

This informative chart of central bank gold net purchasing is courtesy of Weekend Investing:

Interestingly, central banks were net sellers in the 1990s and early 2000s; it was an era of robust economic growth, gold prices were stagnant or declining, and it seemed pointless to hold shiny metal bars when one could invest in financial assets with higher rates of return. The Global Financial Crisis of 2008-2009 apparently sobered up the world as to the fragility of financial assets, making solid metal bars look pretty good. Then, as noted, the Western reaction to the Russian attack on Ukraine spurred central bank buying gold, as this blog predicted back in March, 2022.

Private investors are also buying gold, for similar reasons as the central banks. Gold offers portfolio diversification as a clear alternative from all paper assets. In theory it should offer something of an inflation hedge, but its price does not always track with inflation or interest rates.

Here is how gold (using GLD fund as a proxy) has fared versus stocks (S&P 500 index) and intermediate term U. S. T-bonds (IEF fund) in the past year:

Gold is up by 40%, compared to 12.6% for stocks. That is huge outperformance. This was driven largely by the fact that gold rose strongly in the Feb-April timeframe, while stocks were collapsing.

Below we zoom out to look at the past ten years, and include the intermediate-term T-bond fund IEF:

Gold prices more than doubled from 2008 to 2011, then suffered a long, painful decline over the next two years. Prices were then fairly stagnant for the mid-2010s, rose significantly 2019-2020, then stagnated again until taking off in 2023. Stocks have been much more erratic. Most of the time stock returns were above gold, but the 2020 and 2024 plunges brought stocks down to rough parity with gold. Since about 2019, T-bonds have been pathetic; pity the poor investor who has been (according to traditional advice) 40% invested in investment-grade bonds.

How to invest in gold? Hard-core gold bugs want the actual coins (no-one can afford a full bullion bar) to rub between their fingers and keep in their own physical custody. You can buy coins from on-line dealers or local dealers. Coins are available from the U.S. Mint, but reportedly their mark-ups are often higher than on the secondary market. 

An easier route for most folks is to buy into a gold-backed stock fund. The biggest is GLD, which has over $100 billion in assets. There has long been an undercurrent of suspicion among gold bugs that GLD’s gold is not reliably audited or that it is loaned out; they refer derisively to GLD as “paper gold” or gold derivatives.  The fund itself claims that it never lends out its gold, and that its bars are held in the vaults of the custodian banks JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. and HSBC Bank plc, and are independently audited. The suspicious crowd favors funds like Sprott Physical Gold Trust, PHYS. PHYS is claimed to have a stronger legal claim on its physical gold than GLD. However, PHYS is a closed-end fund, which means it does not have a continuous creation process like GLD, an open-end ETF. This can lead to discrepancies between the fund’s share price and the value of its gold holdings. It does seem like PHYS loses about 1% per year relative to GLD.

Disclaimer: Nothing here should be taken as advice to buy or sell any security.