Five or six years ago, few private investors were very concerned about the price of gold. Then came the financial crisis. When major banks were failing, a sense of apocalypse focused investors' minds on the value of physical assets as never before.
But other factors were at work. The evolution of new investment vehicles and trading platforms suddenly made it easy for private investors to buy small parcels of real gold. With "physical gold" exchange-traded funds, for instance, investors buy shares quoted on the London Stock Exchange, where each share is backed by solid gold stored in a Docklands bank vault. You could buy and sell gold as easily as you could blue-chip shares. LINK...
