Paper/plastic currency (cash) has 0 FCF, 0 earnings, 0 dividends. The whole thesis is you trade it at a deprecated rate later.
You can trade gold and cash with people a lot more easily than an equity in your brokerage account.
You can trade gold and cash with people a lot more easily than an equity in your brokerage account.
A court cannot generally find that I must furnish someone with some weight of gold for example but they can find a monetary value in sovereign currency which I must supply.
As a daily currency, it also has sharp downsides, but at least it’s not all bad.
Inflation means "interest" on gold, measured in reliable currencies like USD or EUR, is at least 4%. Far more than you will get from any bank.
Of course this goes for anything, so you might want to select something with less regulation attached to it. On the other hand, gold is really dense and "liquid" (easy to sell), which are great advantages to have for a store of wealth. And then there's the recent history of gold prices (which is due to the third world attempting to use anything but dollars but not succeeding at it, but one assumes it will end)
But yes, gold makes less than you'll probably get on the S&P500.
Only for very large amounts of money. It can't easily be subdivided. Oh and this is illegal in most countries.
But yeah, what people forget is that gold is incredibly dense. Nearly double lead's density. This means 1kg of gold is about the size of a nokia 3360, and worth close to 150,000$. A very large amount of gold doesn't take up much volume at all.
... which also means that people "stealing gold" like in the bond movies is totally unrealistic. If you loaded a pallet of gold bars (12.5 kg a piece, 200 gold bars, about 2.5 tons, 375 million USD) into a standard van, that van would probably just break down. And carrying 10 gold bars, 20 million USD in a backpack? Not happening.
(which frankly Trump is abusing because of course the density of gold means that any facility storing gold, including Fort Knox, is going to "look empty")