Gold isn’t an income asset. It pays nothing. It sits in a vault or in your hand and holds the buying power that paper currencies, over long enough horizons, don’t. That’s what it does — and that is the whole point of owning it.

Investors hold physical gold for three reasons: to diversify away from paper, to own the metal outright with no counterparty in the middle, and to protect the real value of long-horizon savings. It’s a role stocks and bonds cannot fill, because stocks and bonds are promises written by other parties. A gold coin isn’t a promise. It is the thing itself.

Central banks hold over thirty-six thousand tons of it. They aren’t holding it out of sentiment.

The central-bank ledger is the clearest tell. Over a thousand tons of gold were purchased by central banks in 2023, and again in 2024. Institutions that can hold any asset in the world are choosing the one that carries no counterparty at all. The spot price below is live and updates every business day. Today it sits near $5,174 per ounce.

The gold spot price is the current market price of one troy ounce, set on the LBMA in London and COMEX in New York. It moves throughout the trading day and is the baseline every serious buyer and seller starts from. Today it sits near $5,174.

The premium is what you pay above spot. It covers minting, distribution, and the desk’s margin. Bars carry the lowest premiums — roughly two to five percent over spot for a one-ounce bar. Government-minted coins run four to eight percent. Fractional coins, by the ounce, carry the widest premiums of all. The right comparison is total outlay, not the headline spot quote.

Coins that trade on their weight hold their value across owners. Coins that trade on their story hold their value only for the person telling the story.

We don’t sell numismatic coins, proof sets, or rarity pitches. Every product we place meets the IRS purity bar for a precious metals IRA, which means the same coin that sits in your home safe can sit at an approved depository under an IRA custodian without any further question.

Gold coins and gold bars hold the same underlying metal. They serve different roles. Coins — American Gold Eagles, Canadian Maple Leafs, American Buffalos — carry sovereign guarantees of weight and purity, sell to any dealer in the world, and fit inside a retirement account. They are the most liquid form of physical gold.

Bars carry lower premiums and store more tightly. A hundred-ounce bar from an LBMA-approved refiner — PAMP Suisse, Valcambi, Credit Suisse — costs less per ounce than the same metal struck into coins. The trade-off is liquidity: a four-hundred-ounce bar takes longer to sell than a roll of one-ounce Eagles. Most long-view buyers hold both. Coins for flexibility. Bars for accumulation.

Gold purity is expressed as fineness (.9999 = 99.99 percent pure) or karats (24K = pure gold, 22K = 91.67 percent). Investment-grade gold is .999 fine or higher, with the American Gold Eagle the familiar exception. Verification comes from assay certificates on bars, sovereign mint marks on coins, and XRF testing at the depository level.

A self-directed IRA can hold physical gold, silver, platinum, or palladium alongside (or instead of) stocks and bonds. It uses the same tax-deferred structure as a traditional IRA — you pay taxes on withdrawal, not on growth. The metal itself is stored at an IRS-approved depository under your account name, not at home.

The IRS requires gold at .995 fine or higher. The American Gold Eagle is the single exception at 91.67 percent, because Congress carved it out in the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997. Silver must be .999, platinum and palladium .9995. Funding comes by direct transfer from an existing IRA, 401(k), TSP, or 403(b), with no tax consequences when the paperwork is handled custodian-to-custodian. See the full rule sheet for the code that governs the account itself.