Interesting post and stats bron, thanks for that. So from that graph it looks like people feel that the economy right now is better than in 1999 and 2000 Weird how after 9/11 when uncertainty was gripping most of the world there was still a decrease! I'm confused lol
very interesting people starting waking up to the ponzi scheme post GFC and started stacking heavily, expect this to continue for a few years yet.
I think you need to bear in mind that in 1999 and 2000, the market was not mature, 100M compared to today's 3.5B. It would be more interesting to see the sum of allocated and delivered against unallocated.
The 20% amount in the early graph is when we only had $100m of metal so not many customers so maybe that is not a representative sample at that time, compared to now when Depository has 13000 active clients across many account sizes and many countries.
I think its still representative of the overall trend. I imagine a lot of early clients would have been holding allocated because "that's my gold in the vault, right?" That's how people traditionally think of holding bullion. As more people started investing in precious metals, they would have taken more time to work out the pros and cons of each type of storage and free storage of unallocated is pretty great if you'd rather spend the savings buying into rising stock or real estate markets. The GFC would have given all those people pause to think about the benefits of having allocated bullion "ready to ship" in a short amount of time.
Out of curiosity what is the geographic spread of those clients? Understand if you cannot release this, was just interested in where the bulk of 'gold buyers' might be located.
The whole Perth Mint business is pretty much export. In Depository 50% of clients are US, I can't remember the % Australian. I will probably do a post on the geographic spread of clients in the future.
That is interesting. Perth Mint was mentioned in Peter Schiffs Crash Proof book, maybe a few followed his advice.
