In Europe and the US there is a increasing number of investors switching to a more solid investment from the usual shares and currency to privately owned gold bullion. Buying the gold though, is not the easiest of things in the world to do and trying to store it somewhere can be even more difficult.



The ways most people buy gold are in the form of physical gold coins like the American gold eagle or the Canadian coins, there are gold mining shares and mutual funds and there are certificates where you can buy gold but what I want to talk about here is owning it directly and not through intermediaries, in the form of gold bars.

Research today indicates that about 1,000 people a day are searching the internet for ways to buy gold. There are two major patterns that researchers have found that cause people to want to possess physical bullion and store it in a vault and one is a lack of faith in the major currencies, especially the Dollar and even the Euro.

Physical bullion trading cost have come down in recent times because for a long time the bars of bullion have always been to large for the average private investors and in the professional bullion market it is required that each bar has a history for right at the time it was manufactured into a bar and that they have always been stored within a vault. When a private investor takes a small bar out from the vault into a private storage place, it immediately loses its integrity and in turn devalues it by somewhere between 3-5% compared to the professional bars on the market.

Now with the aid of the internet, retail buyers and sellers can cut out the middle man and meet up directly cutting the costs down. This method is appealing to a lot of investors as they know exactly how much they own and are comfortable that they feel in control. Gold coins are nice for collectors and some people still want to hold them in private storage but as I said, doing this reduces the value of the gold by a percentage and in the end, holding it in a vault permanently is a much more secure method.

Bullion Vault, a company within the UK makes use of Brinks Allied vaults for the safe keeping of their gold and having Brinks storing you investment; you can be assured that your investment is safe. Buying online is a very liquid method trading, if you buy a sum of gold one day, you can off load it the next over the internet immediatly. In this fast paced world, real spending power with real currency such as gold can prove useful for years to come.

When it comes down to it, gold is the ultimate security investment. As seen with its recent growth from early 2006 to 2008, it can't be over looked when it comes to building and investment portfolio. Investment and financial analysts agree that between 15 - 20% of investments should consist of the most hard of all assets, precious gold bullion.