Chris Blasi, President of Neptune-GBX (Global Bullion Exchange), joined Keith Black, Managing Director of RIA Channel, to discuss physical precious metals, including gold, silver, platinum, and palladium.
Neptune provides advisors and their clients access to investment-grade physical precious metals. Neptune’s platform offers bullion assets for both qualified and non-qualified accounts. An important differentiator with Neptune is that the investor clients directly own the physical bullion stored on an insured basis through Neptune and its COMEX-approved depository partner, International Depository Services of Delaware.
Neptune’s competing products have a lower carrying cost than the largest gold and silver ETFs, thereby increasing the investor’s total return and offsetting a portion of the advisor’s AUM fees. Further, clients can easily take physical distribution of the underlying bullion in their account if desired.
Neptune’s platform and products support the business models of RIAs and wealth managers, both AUM and transactional. This is achieved by Neptune reporting on client transactions and positions into the software systems utilized by advisors to run their businesses, such as Addepar, Orion, and Black Diamond.
Precious metals are the world’s third largest financial market by volume, trading $140 billion daily. Since entering its secular bull market in 2001, gold has produced an annualized return of 9.1%, compared to the S&P 500’s return of 8.2% or bonds at 3.3%.
Alternative investments are the fastest-growing investment option and are increasingly utilized by HNW and UHNW clients. While physical bullion is categorized as an alternative investment, it has many benefits not offered by many alternative investments. These benefits include excellent liquidity, transparency, real-time valuation, divisibility, and portability.
Factors that debase the value of the US dollar, such as inflation, money printing, and increasing national debt, generally drive gold prices higher. Today’s macroeconomic environment continues to be constructive for gold prices with central bank buying, geopolitical tensions, governmental deficit spending, and continued price inflation. Silver is another favorite of physical precious metals investors, and it shares various characteristics found in both gold and the more industrial metals; platinum and palladium. Blasi added that in a bull market phase for the precious metals, the upward price moves in silver tend to lag those of gold.
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