Physical vs. Artificial: Two Types of Metals Investing

I talk with a lot of precious metals investors who come into buying gold and silver excited about applying some of the short term trading concepts that we talk about at most of our TRADEway events, to gold and silver. They're excited about taking advantage of the upside potential that they hear about all the time, whether it's on a radio show, TV commercials, or anything on TV.

Here at TRADEway, we like to put a little bit of a different spin on it. We like to divide precious metals into two different categories and then apply certain trading mindsets or concepts to those categories.

Physical Gold and Silver
Physical gold and silver includes bars, coins, and things like that. Our TRADEway precious metals division puts most of its emphasis on how to utilize those kinds of investments to preserve the money that you've worked hard for, that you're saving to pass down to the next generation, whether that's an inheritance or  just preserving some of your funds within a portfolio. That's what physical gold and silver is used for.

We show you how to be cost effective when buying coins and bars. We talk about “hyper-longterm investing”. It's a funny sounding concept, but it's something that we've been utilizing within our family for three generations and we teach you exactly how to do that in the precious metals course that we offer.

Artificial Precious Metals
There is another category of precious metals investing as well, “artificial precious metals”. This includes gold and silver shares that you can invest in, on the comex or the commodities exchange. That would include gold and silver ETFs, gold and silver stocks, mining stocks, things like that.  It provides you a way to be exposed to the precious metals market but apply short term trading concepts without having to compromise the more long term trading concepts that we teach when it comes to buying the physical gold and silver.

If that's more of what you're interested in doing, you may think about more of the artificial side of things. Whether that's the GLD ETF, SIVR, which are a couple of the ETFs for gold and silver, and then of course, there's gold and silver stocks, mining stocks, and in some cases, depending on the trading platform that you use, you can purchase shares of gold and silver from the commodity exchange and trade them more in the short term in that regard.

Keep that in mind. If you're an excited precious metals investor, coming in and wanting to take advantage of that upside potential, think about dividing them into those categories and applying certain long term trading mindsets, or concepts, to the physical side of things and then more short term concepts to the artificial.