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“The #1 Way to Own Gold — Even if the Dollar Rises” (Mega Trends)

What's the gold investment teased by Teeka Tiwari of the Palm Beach Research Group?

By Travis Johnson, Stock Gumshoe, April 22, 2015

Earlier this week, when I was looking into Teeka Tiwari’s pitch about stealing from Vladimir Putin, I promised that I’d follow up and look at the gold investment he was also teasing in that letter… so let’s get to it!

His overall spiel is selling something he calls the “New Cold War Playbook” as a bonus report for subscribers to his Mega Trends newsletter, which he says is “on sale” for $99, the biggest push in there was for the US LNG companies and the European utilities who will benefit from the US LNG export boom that’s widely expected… but then he gets into this gold stuff…

“The 5th and final part of the ‘New Cold War Playbook’ may be the most valuable of all….

“Throughout history, nothing has beat gold as a storehouse of wealth.

“And I’ve just found a fantastic way to own it. It’s easy to buy—you can do it through the stock market. Your gold is stored and backed by the Canadian government, so you know it’s safe.”

OK, so that’s not all that exciting — there are lots of ways to buy gold and have it stored safely… but he says there are some special features that make this gold investment better:

“… there are a few extra perks of owning gold this way:

“1) If your stake is big enough, then you are allowed to redeem a portion for physical gold once a month, if you’d like. They’ll ship it to you, and deduct the cost from your stake.

“2) You can own this play in an IRA or Roth IRA.

“3) Finally, if you sell this play, you are only taxed at 15% or so—not the 28% rate that most coins and ETFs are taxed.”

So that gives us our answer — what he’s teasing here is a closed-end investment trust called the Sprott Physical Gold Trust (PHYS). This was super-popular a few years ago, back when gold was flying and people were paranoid that the more popular and liquid gold ETFs like GLD were just “paper gold” and wouldn’t give you any real guarantee if the world financial system collapsed and sent us back to the iron age. The idea that this trust was entirely physical gold (no futures or anything like that) and was redeemable got people very excited.

The fund went public to much fanfare (in gold circles, at least) in 2010, and that Summer the shares briefly traded up to about a 20% premium to the value of the bullion they held. Which was obviously stupid, so it’s good that by 2013 they had settled down (with gold falling) and started trading mostly in line with NAV… or, more recently, at a small discount to NAV. Which is as it should be for a closed-end fund most of the time.

A closed-end fund means that they can’t issue new shares every day and balance out the NAV by issuing more shares and buying more gold when new investors want more like the big ETFs do, or have a redemption mechanism by which institutions and money makers can redeem ETF shares for their constituent parts and therefore keep the shares extremely close to the net asset value. But there is a redemption feature — it’s a pointless one for most individual investors, but it’s there. Anyone who owns in excess of 400 gold ounces (that’s the size of a “London Good Delivery” bar, a traditional storage size) worth of shares in the fund can redeem them and have them delivered. That’s about half a million dollars right now, if you are investing in that kind of size you’re presumably doing some kind of careful assessment about how the management fee of the fund (0.35% annually) compares to the storage fees you’d pay to just have your own vault space somewhere.

The other complication, which might be a benefit for some, is that the Sprott Physical Gold Trust is almost certain to be classified as a Passive Foreign Investment Company (PFIC) every year, which means that tax reporting is more onerous and, if you don’t elect to classify your holdings as a Qualifying Electing Fund (QEF), might be punitive. If you do make the QEF election, which you have to do each year you hold the fund by submitting an IRS form, then you should be able to pay regular capital gains taxes when you sell — the benefit there is that (assuming you hold for more than a year) you can get the long-term capital gains tax break instead of paying the 28% rate that is due on collectible sales (gold coins or bars, and ETFs like GLD, are taxed as collectibles). I’m not a tax advisor, and I’ve never done this — but do be careful if you buy this kind of fund/trust, the PFIC tax regime is the default so if you don’t make your QEF election you can get a nasty tax surprise… and there is some complexity in the QEF forms, though it looks like the PHYS folks are probably good about providing the data you need for the form. (I don’t think that this applies to tax-deferred accounts — you shouldn’t have to make a QEF election for an IRA, as I understand it, because the cost basis doesn’t matter to the IRS).

So that’s the investment — the PHYS trust. I think that for most small investors, the obsessive assessment of the merits of different gold funds is a waste of time — if you’re really just trying to mimic the gold price without the cost of buying and storing your own physical gold, and you want liquidity so you can buy and sell every day, the GLD ETF works just fine and all of the gold ETFs and closed-end funds track the price of gold very closely most of the time. And if you’re specifically obsessed with the legitimacy of the gold physically held by the fund and your chance of getting your hands on it, I think the difference between PHYS and GLD is pretty thin. SPDR Gold Shares (GLD) holds their gold bars in custodian banks, mostly HSBC, and publishes lists of those bars and inspects them a couple times a year… PHYS holds their gold bars at the Royal Canadian Mint, which is a for-profit Crown Corporation. Both could incur some risk and/or expense if the custodian were to go bankrupt, be seized by the government, or have their vault hit by a meteor — if you’re overwhelmingly worried about those risks, or the relatively minor differences between storage with a Crowm corporation versus a bank, then you’ll probably be a lot happier paying the costs of keeping your gold allocation in some physical storage near you. Those are, to my mind, largely minor differences that would come into play only if there’s a dramatic financial upheaval — and if you can predict whether the next crisis we see is more likely to lead to HSBC going bankrupt or the Canadian government seizing the assets of the Mint, and you can also predict how the rule of law will shake out for those who hold assets in custody with those corporations, you’re far more prescient than I.

Really, this is just another way to buy exposure to gold through your brokerage account — it’s a relatively reasonably priced way to do it right now, and it comes with some tax implications for taxable investors, but you’re just buying gold… it’s not magically better than buying gold in other ways.

PHYS has tracked almost exactly with GLD over the past year, and even if you go back to the IPO of the PHYS trus in February 2010 the overall return of PHYS (2.6%) has been very close to the return of GLD (5%) for those 5+ years — if you bought PHYS when it was trading at a serious premium (more than a half a percent or so) you made a mistake and you lost money because that premium rightly withered away, but buying PHYS at within a whisker of NAV, which you can usually do with some patience, would have gotten you the same returns as buying GLD (or more, if you were prescient enough to sell when the premium has briefly popped higher from time to time during moments of gold enthusiasm). The risk is that, unlike GLD, there’s not a lot of liquidity or a strong mechanism for the share price tracking NAV every day — so if gold collapses and everyone wants to sell at once in a panic, the shares could easily be trading at a big discount to NAV just when you might feel the urge to sell. That could theoretically happen with GLD too, I suppose, for brief windows of time, but it’s much more of a risk with PHYS.

And there’s also the much smaller Merk Gold Trust (OUNZ), which is more redeemable than PHYS for individual unitholders — their minimum fees mean that it only makes sense if you own about 40 ounces worth, but they’ll redeem into gold coins and send them to you for a per-ounce fee of $25-60 (minimum fee is about 40X that amount, which is probably why you’d want to redeem for at least 40 ounces). That, likewise, has traded pretty much exactly in line with PHYS since OUNZ went public about a year ago.

On the more volatile side of things, if you’re interested in closed-end vehicles for buying precious metals you can also check out the Central Fund of Canada (CEF), the granddaddy of closed-end bullion funds. They own both gold and silver bullion (and have separately traded funds for those two metals as well, Central GoldTrust (GTU) and Silver Bullion Trust (SBT in Canada, SVRZF OTC in the US)… none of those promise delivery but they say 95%+ of NAV is invested in physical metal that they control, all of them are at substantial discounts to NAV, they’re also likely to fall under the PFIC rules when it comes to taxes.

Tiwari also says that he’s got a special way to buy this fund (or something else gold-related) to help hedge against the rising dollar — since, like most commodities, a rising dollar will make the value of the commodity fall in dollar terms. Here’s how he puts that:

“When the dollar is rising, gold prices either stagnate or fall.

“I’ve found a way for you to own this investment that takes most of that currency risk out of the equation. It’s a hedge fund trick I picked up from my days on Wall Street.

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“Anyone can do it. It’s just a second button you check when you go to your brokerage account.”

I don’t know exactly what his “hedge fund trick” might be, but presumably he means that you hedge your gold exposure by also going long the dollar in some way. The most widely traded pure “dollar bull” currency trading ETF is the PowerShares DB US Dollar Index Bullish Fund (UUP), which trades futures to bet on the rise in the US dollar versus a basket of other major world currencies.

I suppose you could use long-term call options to give yourself a bit of exposure to this fund and go bullish on the dollar if you want to hedge some of that “risk” of a rising dollar and what that might mean for your gold position, but keep in mind that none of this is presumably in a vacuum — you hold other stuff in your portfolio, too, and if you’re a US investor you probably have your savings account or other cash assets that are effectively “dollar bull” bets because they’re just, well, dollars.

And any sneaky stuff you think you might want to try, like buying gold using some other currency than the dollar, is, for most small investors, just silly and expensive — you’re going to buy that other currency using dollars first, then convert the money back into dollars when you need to spend it anyway, why do you care whether it shows up on your portfolio screen in Canadian dollars or US dollars or Euros or whatever else? If you want to speculate on the direction of currencies then go ahead, and if you want to hedge against the “risk” that the dollar might remain the strongest currency (which is, to some extent given the relationship between gold and the dollar in recent years, like buying gold and simultaneously hedging against gold), then you can certainly try it… but most people lose money in currency trading because of leverage and unpredictable geopolitics and geo-economics (remember the Swiss Franc a few months ago?), and making an investment more complicated doesn’t necessarily make it better. Hedging currencies when you’re buying international stocks (like the very popular currency-hedged ETFs for Japan or Europe or almost anywhere else that have cropped up in recent years and done very well) makes a lot more sense than hedging currencies when you’re buying a precious metal, in my opinion, particularly when countries are actively trying to drive down their currency in order to benefit their export-focused corporations.

If you want to go even further into the currency/gold stuff, there are also now a couple actively managed ETFs that trade futures — both using the Gartman name, for the insufferable sometime CNBC commentator and longtime newsletter writer. The AdvisorShares Gartman Gold/Yen (GYEN) and Gold/Euro (GEUR) funds effectively go long gold options and short the options of whatever currency to get exposure that would be like using Yen or Euros to buy gold. Both of those have done far better than gold this year because the Yen and Euro have both gone down so much.

Gold is usually thought of as a way to maintain purchasing power even though most “paper” currencies depreciate over time most of the time (because central banks try to provide a decent “not too hot, not too cold” level of perpetual price inflation by increasing the money supply), and I hold a little gold for largely that reason, but just because it has historically been a “store of value” for many long periods of human history doesn’t mean it will be a store of value for the next year, or even the next five or ten years. It’s more a diversification of savings in my mind than it is a speculation on gold prices.

So… there you have it, Teeka Tiwari must be teasing the Sprott Physical Gold Trust (PHYS), and perhaps he’s doing something extra-crafty to partially hedge against that bet by also betting on the dollar. Sound like your cup of tea? Let us know with a comment below.

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Matt
Member
Matt
April 22, 2015 1:59 pm

This ought to get the conspiracy buffs drooling: consider the letter I got from JP Morgan Chase last week about my safe deposit box. The letter detailed new terms of lease in which coins (unless deemed “collectible”) and bullion were expressly prohibited from being stored in their boxes. Furthermore, if you are in any way found in breach of the lease agreement, you forfeit all rights to the contents of the box.

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quincy adams
Guest
quincy adams
April 22, 2015 2:22 pm

I’ve always considered that the #1 way to own gold is to find it while digging your septic tank system.

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RotoRooter
Guest
RotoRooter
April 22, 2015 3:14 pm
Reply to  quincy adams

I’ve always considered that the #1 way to own gold is to find it while cleaning out your septic tank system.

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Bob Bleil
Member
Bob Bleil
April 22, 2015 2:29 pm

I prefer IAU over GLD because management fees are incrementally lower. Otherwise, pretty much the same, as far as I can tell.

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hedy1234
hedy1234
April 22, 2015 3:30 pm

He fully hedges his PHYS against the dollar rising further by buying a Yen short fund.

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CoolSoupy
Irregular
April 22, 2015 4:20 pm

CEF @ 8% discount. Plus they offer transparency = honesty!

sharpblue
sharpblue
April 22, 2015 6:00 pm

I like CEF too. It really takes an amazingly small amount of good news in gold to cause the discount to vanish. I have picked up about 5% this way on gold price moves of less than 5%. No get rich quick but a nice bonus for holding gold. The key, of course, is to have the patience to wait for an outsized discount and then buy when the news is bad.

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Patricia
April 22, 2015 8:15 pm

Travis, I like and follow the Sprott fellows but trust you just a little more in the final analysis – because you aren’t trying to attract investors as are they, and because of your detatched attitude towards gold . Personally I’ve never experienced any serious gold fever – I just acknowledge the reality of an economically unstable world in which billions of people highly value gold/silver and historically always have. So in times of trouble they will still fall back on it as a safe haven, I don’t see that changing any time soon. Even recently it has retained its value as measured against all currencies except the U.S. dollar.

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jrm1960
jrm1960
April 23, 2015 1:10 pm

RE: What’s the paperwork like to comply with Qualified Election Form (QEF) reporting in a taxable account?
For the second year running, I as a single, individual filer have filled out IRS Form 8621 to allow (eventually) selling a Sprott fund Passive Foreign Investment Company (PFIC) fund, SPPP, as a long term capital gains taxable event. (Looks like an idential process for PHYS.) The Sprott website does have the info to plug into the form, and that info is easy to find on the fund’s homepage.

For self-preparers like me, 8621 is one of the easier IRS forms to understand. But! Because I use TurboTax Home & Business software that doesn’t know about form 8621, I have to first e-file my 1040 through TurboTax, then after the return is “accepted,” usually a couple days, I mail in a hard copy of 1040x, the amendment form, with 8621, stating the situation in the 1040x comments box. TurboTax can fill out the 1040x, though it needs you to be assertive. It doesn’t “understand” why you want a 1040x with the Before and After numbers the same.

No problem with IRS last year.

I have not yet sold a QEF designated fund, so can’t speak to the extra paperwork, if any, to get the sale onto the Long Term Capital Loss/Gain sheet. Would be glad to hear from anyone who has successfully done this.

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hendrixnuzzles
May 8, 2015 10:19 pm
Reply to  jrm1960

$PHYS I’m long but it’s in an IRA so I don’t think the tax thing is an issue.

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KEN
Member
April 28, 2015 4:52 pm

ALL OF US ARE GETTING THISBIG COME ON OF HOW THE FINANTIAL OR STOCK MARKET OR WORLD CHANGING MONEY SYSTEM IS GOING TO OCCUR IN OCT 2015????? IF YOU DO NOT ACT NOW HOW SORRY YOU WILL BE… DO YOU KNOW WHAT THIS BIG CHANGE IS THAT THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT?????? SOMETHING WITH A MONEY CHANGE????? THANKS KEN

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hendrixnuzzles
May 8, 2015 10:17 pm
Reply to  KEN

I have not subscribed to any of these pitches nor have I seen the detailed explanations, but I suspect they are talking about the International Monetary Fund making a decision in October that will relate to giving China’s currency more of a role in IMF policies and “drawing rights”.

Another aspect to this is that people of the alarmist persuasion maintain that the
IMF may create a “special drawing rights”, composed of a basket of the currencies of participating countries, that will serve as the final “bail-out” currency of last resort in a
cataclysmic financial meltdown in the U.S.. This could be done with China in the club, or not. Jim Rickards is of this view . He maintains that in the next crisis, the Fed will not be able to bail out the bankruptcies as in the past, and that the Fed itself will need to be “bailed out” by the IMF, and a new world megacurrency will be put in place as the
dollar becomes severely devalued even more than it is already.

Such an event would have a drastic impact on all financial classes, and would be accompanied by rather tumultuous changes in our assets, especially bank and brokerage accounts.

The role of China is a big wild card. They want more influence but the US has 40% or so of the voting power in the IMF and has not been making friendly noises towards China.
The Chinese have been pretty reasonable on the face of it and cannot completely
chuck the dollar overboard because they have so many of the darned things. On the other hand they have been making deals with everybody, especially the Russians, so they will not have to rely on dollars, they have been buying gold like crazy and encouraging their citizens to do so also, and they have been acquiring all manner of other hard assets all over the world, thus putting their over-valued US dollars to good use. So all things considered, their policies seem pretty sound to me, they are not going to come begging to the US and the IMF to be let into the country club. They could even start a gold backing for their currency.

They will be prepared to go their own way if they need to…after they reduce their position in US dollars.

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hendrixnuzzles
May 8, 2015 11:50 pm

I agree the Chinese value stability. They are very deliberate and have a lot of their own problems to worry about. But they are hedging their bets as far as the US dollar is concerned, and they are doing it very rapidly. What happens with them getting a place in the IMF is anybody’s guess.

From the Chinese point of view, they are looking for changes to the world financial system that does not work to their advantage. They will see it as correcting an unfair situation dominated by the U.S., and if their actions cause some instability in the US financial system, I don’t think they will be especially concerned about it.

As far as valuing stability…all the governments value stability in their own back yard but don’t care so much for it in the backyard of their perceived adversaries. For example, the US has been pushing the Russians pretty hard in Ukraine, risking a lot of stability, because we think we can win. We don’t care too much about the stability in the Russian economy or ruble, in fact we helped create chaos over there. Current events in the Middle East and other places show that even those who value stability may not be able to achieve it in their own sphere of interest.

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hendrixnuzzles
May 8, 2015 11:55 pm

In a thread some time ago, I mentioned some time ago that I thought the Chinese would be well-served to send a lot of the US dollars to the Russians in exchange for Russian raw materials. The Russians need foreign currency and the Chinese want to lock up raw materials.

Lo and behold…today there is news of a 25 billion dollar sino-Russian trade deal. And while researching Russian cell phone provider MBT, I see a news mention that they are receiving
loans from a Chinese development bank.

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hendrixnuzzles
May 11, 2015 7:27 am

More significant Chinese investment and co-operation with Russia (Belarus)

Chinese President was in Russia/Belarus for their war memorial which we snubbed on account of Russian action in Ukraine, used occasion to announce huge new trade package.

http://eng.belta.by/all_news/economics/Thirteen-big-Chinese-companies-to-become-residents-of-Great-Stone-park_i_81664.html

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Alfred Jones
Member
Alfred Jones
December 20, 2015 12:32 pm

Please check out this and let us know what he is talking about.

The Wal-Mart Profit Loophole
By Briton Ryle | Sunday, December 20th, 2015

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