What The Experts Buy
This is an excerpt from a recent interview with Doug Casey of Casey Research.

Louis: Okay; so when you go shopping for gold, what do you buy? Bars? Bullion jewelry? Coins?

Doug: I buy bullion coins, almost exclusively. American Eagles are now probably the most widely recognized and readily accepted bullion coin in the world – they’re becoming mainstay of my stash. But I also have a lot of Canadian maple leafs, Austrian philharmonics, South African krugerrands, Mexican 50-peso coins, and the like.

The Mexican coins usually have the lowest premiums, by the way, and they’re also the largest common coin, in that they contain 37.5 grams of gold, which is, not just coincidentally, equal to a Chinese tael (which is in turn equal to 1.2 troy ounces). In the Orient, people think of gold as much in taels as they do in grams or ounces. The Mexican 50 peso is perhaps the most popular coin in Latin America, especially in Argentina, where I spend a lot of time, because it’s minted in grams. Krugerrands used to be the bullion standard, but they’ve fallen from favor.

The British sovereign is perhaps the most common gold coin, and there are several hundred million out there. It’s also got a low premium, and is worth owning, since it’s only 0.2354 ounces of gold – it’s convenient having something about the size of a nickel that’s worth around $450.

Right now there’s a good opportunity in semi-numismatic gold coins too – not rare collectibles, but pre-1933 US bullion coins, like the Saint-Gaudens and other double eagles.

Louis: So, once you buy your coins, what do you do with them? You can’t stuff them all in your mattress…

Doug: I usually try to dodge that question, in part because I don’t want to publish the details of my own arrangements, and in part because the answer is different for different people in different circumstances. But first and foremost, I have to warn people not to use bank safe-deposit boxes. They are typically not insured, and they put your valuables on record – the last time the US government stole private citizens’ gold, the first thing they did was seal all the bank vaults.