If you want to get into gold and you don’t want have gold bullion collecting dust in the corner of your safe deposit box, then an iShares electronically traded fund might be the way to go for you. With iShares IAU ETF you can own a fractional ownership of gold held by the iShares Gold Trust.

Rather than own large sums of gold you own roughly 1/10th an ounce of gold per share you own in the iShares trust. And the best part is, you can trade these easily from your regular stock trading account. This means if you buy and hold you can take advantage of long term capital gains rules rather than taking the sale of a gold bar as a fully taxed gain, as you would do if you owned gold bars.

Some people say they want to be able to hold the gold, but those same people don’t realize that when they buy stock in a company they have nothing to hold, so why not do the same with buying gold. The ETF IAU will allow you to own a piece of a precious metal that has historically held it’s value. And with the spread of wealth around the world increasing, demand for gold can only go up (or so we think).

Buying gold now during this volatile time period may be risky, but if you hold long enough, we imagine that owning an ETF like IAU will prove to be very valuable, and easy to trade.