A large part of the reason for the movement into pm's is for the historical reasons of owning them.
2 of these are portability and physical size. - ie. You can pack a lot of value into a small package and run like hell with it if necessary.
It also means that you can have physical possession - wherever you choose.
A lot of those reasons evaporate if you have a 'managed fund'.
Eg. if gold is confiscated, what do you think happens to the physical gold held by a managed fund. Also what would happen to a portfolio of pm eft's in the same case.
You don't have to go back far at all to see that governments have a reliable track record of confiscation - just in case you think I am being a little paranoid.
So, my point is - that clearly we are in historic times - we have not seen such large stress in financial and economic areas for a long long time.
So, why would you even think about having a managed fund to look after pm investments? Yes of course some will say that it is more convenient - others might even argue somewhat about security.
However, even thinking of the need to protect one's wealth in this time of duress - strongly suggests that the risks for placing wealth into pm's in either managed funds or anything else that is outside your physical control - is a reasonably high risk and getting higher by the day.
Gold and silver can be treated like an insurance policy - the only difference to a paper one is that - you can actually own and possess what you pay for -------- my suggestion to anyone would be to do that because in the past if the rules change on the ownership of pm's -- there is NO warning - one stroke of the legislative pen and it is done.
