A Wiser Retirement®

290. Is gold still a good investment?

• Wiser Wealth Management • Episode 290

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Gold has long been considered a safe haven during times of uncertainty, often used to hedge against inflation and geopolitical risk. In this episode of the A Wiser Retirement® Podcast, we explore how shifting economic conditions, the rise of lab-created gold, and growing interest in digital assets like Bitcoin are prompting investors to ask: Is gold still a good investment?

Related Blog Post :
- The Future of Gold: Could Lab-Made Gold Send Prices Plummeting?

Related Podcast Episode:
- Ep 220: Is Bitcoin more than digital gold?

Related YouTube Videos:
- Investing for Income vs Growth in Retirement: Finding the Balance
- The Truth about ESG Investing

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Gold vs. Money Printing

Speaker 1

This makes me think of everyone buys gold to like hedge inflation. Right, because that's what happened in the 70s. It was like the biggest inflation and it is sometimes still now. But there's time periods where it's not right, it's not correlated, so it's like, okay, what's the difference in making gold and printing money? Then you know like we're printing money, so the inflation's there and so we're going to hedge that with gold, but now we're making gold.

Speaker 3

So it's like okay, that seems counterintuitive to me. Welcome to a Wiser Retirement Podcast. Are you curious about whether gold is still a good investment? I'm Casey Smith. Today, I'm joined with Senior Financial Advisor Shauna Theriault. Each week, we bring you practical advice on retirement, investing and planning on your financial future. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast wherever you're listening. Let's get started. Hey, shauna.

Speaker 1

Morning. How are you?

Speaker 3

Doing good. I'm on a semi-vacation this week.

Speaker 1

Are you on island time or where are you at?

Speaker 3

I'm sort of on island time in Hilton Head, south Carolina, so I'm hiding in a corner of the house to do this podcast, but there's nothing more fun than a podcast on vacation week, right.

Speaker 1

Right and talking about gold, of all things.

Speaker 3

Well, I am on an island, so what's our topic then? Planning for gold or pirating for gold, right? I mean, there's a pirate ship in the harbor right now. It's it's, I think, you have to be under like three feet to ride it. But um, yeah, for the kids that harbortown here has a little pirate. Our kids did it many years ago but uh I just can't picture.

Speaker 1

I can't picture you dressed up like that casey.

Speaker 3

I just don dress up, you just get on and they have a program for the kids. Let's be clear that's not fun. No, you don't see me dressed up as a pirate.

Speaker 1

That would be fun Halloween maybe.

Speaker 3

Probably not even Halloween. So, anyway, I thought I'd start us off just talking about something I read in the headlines recently, and I actually did a blog on this, which I'll post shortly. So, scientists at CERN that's a European Research Center, they're probably best known they have a particle accelerator, so all of our geeks will know what that is. They have a particle accelerator, so all of our geeks will know, uh, what that is. But they've been able to successfully transform lead into gold, so they're able to change lead into gold. Think about that like instead of.

Speaker 1

Is it actually gold or is it fake?

Speaker 3

well, but they take. They take the particles and they make change the particles to make it into gold. So is it? I mean that's a great question because it leads me into my segue, which is think about diamonds. So diamonds, you have diamonds that you mine, but now they're diamonds that are lab grown and until recently you couldn't hardly tell a difference. You have to buy a new magnifying glass if you're a jeweler to figure out the difference between what's lab-grown and what is. I'm talking about cubic ammonia that are plastic. I'm talking about lab-grown diamonds Lab-grown diamonds.

Speaker 3

Yeah, so I did a deep dive into that, too deep dive into that too. And when I started looking at that, I said well, you know what?

Speaker 1

why would you buy? Why would you buy a lab-grown diamond? And it's not as precious as an actual diamond, right? I mean, if you think about that I don't know.

Speaker 3

I don't know, I mean are they prettier?

Speaker 1

Are they sparkler Well?

Speaker 3

here's what I did. Here's what I did. I was curious, so I walked out of our office and I walked down the street to Wilson Jewelers on the square.

Speaker 1

Did you?

Speaker 3

And I said hey, I read this article about making gold, which made me think about diamonds. And the last time I was in here, you told me about lab grown diamonds versus regular diamonds. And he said, yeah, I had to buy new equipment so I could tell the difference. And I said, well, what are people buying? And he says, well, a lot of people are buying lab-grown. And I said, well, why? Because it's fake. And he said it's not fake, it's real diamond, it was just grown in a lab versus earth making it. And so he goes I guess you can get more for your money. It's about 40 cheaper.

Speaker 3

But he says the prices are starting to starting to converge in some in some spaces. So and he goes yeah, a lot of, a lot of the younger people want lab-grown diamonds because of all the negativity around slave labor or cheap labor for working conditions for regular diamonds. So some people come in and say I don't want to be a part of that culture. I want to just buy the lab-grown diamond. You should get a little bigger diamond for the same amount of money or the same size for cheaper. And if you look at the price of diamonds other than in 2020, as more lab-grown diamonds come onto the market, the price of record, diamonds have been declining, so that immediately made me go huh. And of course he knew nothing about making gold. So I immediately thought about well, what happens if we start making gold and I wouldn't call it a, I guess it is a lab, it's not like a diamond farm, but it's in a lab and how does that affect gold prices? Gold is such a it's a reserve for some countries, right?

Speaker 3

yeah um, so, anyway, go go and look at my article uh, it's linked to this podcast and you can learn about a little more about, uh, about lab-grown diamonds and and if uh, making gold to attain gold prices, uh, that's not. That's not what this podcast is about, necessarily.

Speaker 1

Isn't that? This? Isn't that the this makes me think of? Everyone buys gold to like hedge inflation. Right, because that's what happened in the 70s. It was like the biggest inflation and it is sometimes still now. But there's time periods where it's not right, it's not correlated, and so it's like, ok, what's the difference in making gold and printing money? Then you know, like printing money, so the inflation's there and so we're going to hedge that with gold. But now we're making gold. So it's like, okay, that seems counterintuitive to me. I'm sure Andrew would have a really smart answer to that.

Speaker 1

Not me or you know I always ask these questions because it's like the curiosity.

Speaker 3

If you supply more or something, then it's less valuable Right.

Speaker 1

So it's like, okay, well, if you're making gold and you're printing money, it seems like, is it really oh? If you're doing it at the same time you're printing money, so it's like, oh, I'm going to buy gold, but you're making gold, so it's not really that valuable. The, so it's not really that valuable.

Speaker 3

The money isn't tied to the gold anymore, so I guess they kind of run separate, parallel paths.

Lead into Gold: Modern Alchemy

Speaker 1

So it's just, I don't know, it just seems weird to me. So we need more gold to help people hedge against the printing of the money. I don't know, it's just interesting, interesting thing.

Speaker 3

I don't know, it's interesting times. We'll say that.

Speaker 1

So do you want to talk about Weiser's position in gold in general, because I mean a lot of advisors feel different ways about it.

Speaker 3

Yeah, when we start off with like the history of gold, sure. So the idea is that, like during times of economic turmoil, inflation, political or geopolitical instability, investors typically turn to gold as a safe haven. I call it the fear trade. You're fearful. That's something that you might add to your portfolio.

Speaker 3

It's more tangible than paper assets, I guess I remember so I think most of our listeners know I had a stint in aviation as a as a airline pilot, and I had to sit ready reserve one day, which basically means you sit in a chair in a dark room watching TV, waiting, waiting for something to break or an operation, something to malfunction in the operation of the airline, and so you're the backup pilot, you're the fill-in right, and so it was. I don't know, it was like it was late, it was like an all night thing. I was there at like 1130 at night and so we had to think I had to be there until two o'clock in the morning. But I was sitting there watching, and of course, everybody, a lot of people in aviation, are all from the military, so the military channel is like always on in the crew room. In the crew room there's lots of TVs. So this one section I was in had the military channel on and it was the only one that had volume.

Speaker 3

And it was, I guess, when we pulled out of Vietnam. And you remember, there's these helicopters and they were trying to take the last few of their families and trying to get to Navy ships and they would land on the Navy ship and then it would get asylum into the US. And so this guy had flown to his house and his military helicopter picked up his family and was flying to the ship. And it was one of those helicopters. Helicopter has two blades on top and it was not going to fit on the ship because the other smaller helicopters would land on the ship. People would get out and they'd push the helicopter into the ocean. And so this guy, this guy's government, has got a chinook helicopter with the two blades and he gets up, right, he lowers his family down and then you see him.

Speaker 3

Uh, the commentator's like well, how is he going to get out of the helicopter? So, anyway, he moves the helicopter to the side of the ship, he rolls the helicopter in a perfect form, he jumps out of the side of the helicopter, he goes right into the ocean. I mean, just disappears. Of course there's very bad cameras that are all shaky and everything, but he just disappears from the from. You know, of course it's very bad cameras that are all shaky and everything, but he just disappears. And the commentator uh makes it kind of dramatic, you know.

Speaker 3

But but then he comes back up and what had happened was he had sold. He knew this was going to happen. His family had to get out, so he sold all the material possessions. He bought gold bars and he had gold bars in his backpack. But when he jumped out, he jumped out of the helicopter. He was too heavy to swim with the backpack on, so he had to take the backpack off and the gold sit in the bombos and still today in a backpack. Oh wow, he had to swim to the boat. It's a shame they didn't have Bitcoin back then. You know he brought a virtual Bitcoin on its own.

Speaker 1

I don't know the computer wouldn't have lasted. That would work.

Speaker 3

I think in times of like third world countries, when your country could go out of business or your currency could disappear, the gold makes sense. For us here in America, the chances of happening are just so, so slim, uh, but that you know. That's kind of what prep. That's how preppers feel about it. Um so, anyway, enough of the stories. But if I go back and I'll look at how gold performs in different market conditions, so it does typically do well in periods of high inflation. Did pretty well in 2022. The stock market gets really volatile. In the short term, gold prices will tick up or, obviously, big sell-offs.

Speaker 1

I mean, is that just because people so that's the thing, right, it's speculative, so it's like there's no balance sheet to it. You can't see how it's really performing. It's just what people are willing to buy.

Speaker 3

Yeah, you're just looking at price, so it's like buying it because they're a fear.

Speaker 3

Like you're saying, the fear trade you don't, yeah, you don't have any income from it, you just it's just price um currency devaluation. So if the currency goes down, then gold will go up typically. Yeah, uh, gold does underperform at times when interest rates rise. Gold underperforms performs because gold doesn't produce income, so therefore it couldn't keep up with higher interest rates. If the stock market is really strong or investor confidence is high, gold will typically go up. And you know we did see gold was kind of flat in 22,.

Speaker 3

Actually the big run up was in 24, a little bit of run up during the during the COVID time period as well. So I looked and then said, ok, well, what if? What's the correlation between gold and the stock market? So if you look at over the last 10 years, gold has really no correlation with the stock market years. Gold has really no correlation with the stock market. It doesn't, um, it doesn't go up. It doesn't always go up when the market goes down, doesn't always go down when the market goes up. It just kind of does its own thing. Sometimes it runs, sometimes it runs at the same uh uh same climb as the stock market did almost did that in 24. It was moving up along along with the stock market and in 24.

Speaker 1

I mean maybe that's just historically has changed, cause I looked up to and I know we haven't talked before this, but I looked up to, like when does has it protected against inflation? So so in the seventies and the early eighties it was gold is very effective in, in, you know, helping with inflation. So maybe that's what people are remembering because of what you know. Who's living right now. Right, it's before that no one's you know historically maybe paying attention. And the 1980s and the 1990s it was. It wasn't a hedge for inflation.

Speaker 3

And in 1980 to 1984, it was down almost 10 percent per year.

Speaker 1

Yeah.

Speaker 3

During that time period and inflation was going up 6.4%.

Speaker 1

Yeah, so it wasn't effective during that time period and in the 2010s it was low. It wasn't effective during it and then 2020 to 2024, it was like high inflation and it was mixed effective.

Speaker 3

Yeah.

Speaker 1

And so the thought, know the thought of hey, this could really hedge inflation. It can maybe sometimes, but it's not always done that.

Speaker 3

Just food for thought For a super conservative investor who has very little equity allocation. It does have a negative correlation with short-term bonds, which I thought was interesting. Oh okay. Well.

Speaker 1

I mean and that's what we talk about too, Casey right Like that is. The hedge for inflation is if now, when you're retired, you can't have all of your assets and equities, that would be too risky. Right, Because you need money to live off of when there's downturns, but being invested in equities is a hedge for inflation because they pass through increased prices to the consumers.

Speaker 3

Yeah.

Speaker 1

So I mean that in and of itself is a hedge. So to me, selling stocks to go into gold, you're moving from one inflation hedge to potentially another, but it's the bonds that get hurt with inflationary times potentially.

Gold's Performance History

Speaker 4

Quick check-in. Have you thought about the legacy you'll leave behind? Download 7 Steps to Leave a Financial Legacy. A free guide from Wiser Wealth Management to learn more. It's not just about wealth, it's about leaving a lasting impact. Go to wiserinvestorcom forward slash guides to download your free guide today. Now let's jump back into the episode.

Speaker 3

If you look at the rest of the S&P 500 over the last 10 years, gold's up 171%. That's the 10-year return. As of yesterday. The stock market's up 228% after this tariff sell-off. So the stock market most likely is way ahead up until the tariff sell-off.

Speaker 1

Now, gold sold off too in all the tariff news, but not as much as the stock market did, which is kind of like counter what everyone talks about. Right, because you would think, okay, tariffs prices going up, I need to buy gold to hedge inflation. But gold went down.

Speaker 3

Right.

Speaker 1

So it's not acting like it did maybe in the 70s and 80s.

Speaker 3

Maybe not. It's also different problems today than what we had back at that time. I think the biggest issue I have with gold is it just doesn't generate the income that other asset classes will, so therefore you have to time it. So would you buy gold now, when it's only 5% off its all-time high? Is now the time to be buying gold? I don't know. You have to be market timer with gold and you know what I used to tell people is that if you're going to buy gold, then you should buy it and put it in your vault.

Speaker 1

Not your backpack. Not your backpack. That would be bad when you're jumping out of a plane.

Speaker 3

But honestly, I started researching that and when you buy gold you have to pay 1% to 5% above the spot price. So the spot price is $350. You're going to pay the dealer 1% to 5% more for it. If you buy a smaller quantity, like less than a bar size, you're going to pay 10% to 15% more for the premium to buy it. But then when you sell it it's two to 10% less spot price. So when you it's almost kind of like a old school HHR mutual fund you buy in, you're going to pay four and a quarter percent Look old. You're going to pay one to 15%, depending on how much you're buying. And so you're you're negative.

Speaker 3

Let's say it's 3%. You're negative 3% from the start and then you have to wait for it to rise 3% to get to your purchase price break even. But then if you sell it you're going to lose 2% to 10%. Let's call it 5% on the sale in a transaction fee. They don't really call it a transaction fee, it's just the price they give you. So there's a bid and there's an ask, I guess kind of like how a stock would trade. So not only you can't this is not something you trade frequently.

Speaker 3

It's something you buy and you have to have a long-term conviction that this is going to be here for the portfolio and the problem that I have. I mean, you and I have been doing this. I won't tell people how long you've been doing it. I'll tell people I've been doing this for 25 years.

Speaker 1

You think I'm going to be offended. You're just saying girls age. Gosh, she's old.

Speaker 3

I don't want to back into it.

Speaker 1

Well, I started young, young, so that's fair.

Speaker 3

I mean that's right, I started when you were 12 and you've been doing this for 20 you always say I look 35, so it's fine I said 25 oh well, good well, now they know you're lying that's right. So if you start, if you start back, even in, like in 2015, is what my chart goes back to. You did nothing for so long. You went five years with not much of a return.

Speaker 1

Sounds like bonds to me. Sounds like costly bonds.

Speaker 3

I would say what's the opportunity cost? And I never. Whenever we have a new client come in and has gold, I never see it be like three to five percent of our portfolio. It's like a ridiculous number like 30 in gold?

Speaker 1

uh yeah, because it's like, can five to ten percent really make a big difference anyway? So you'd have to buy enough to make a difference. And then, but it's so, I don't, it's so speculative and, to your point, it doesn't have the growth potential. I mean maybe then, but it's so, I don't know, it's so speculative and, to your point, it doesn't have the growth potential. I mean, maybe it's more, it's more of seen as a hedge for a downturn, so it's to me it's like bearish.

Speaker 3

I go back to. I go back to if people were more educated about investing, would they fear? Would they feel the need to buy gold?

Speaker 1

Right, or using a bucket system, like we talk about all the time.

Speaker 3

You know, yeah, Like if you it's just like annuities. If a person was educated about investing like we sat down and we took them through like wiser one-on-one on. This is how markets and portfolios work and this is how you protect yourself from volatility. Would we even have to? We don't sell annuities, but would anybody ever do this and say, no, I didn't go with wiser, I bought the annuity. Would that?

Trading and Tax Considerations

Speaker 1

ever happen. Well, you know it's interesting. You say that because when I explain, whether in a client meeting or a prospect meeting or just in general, you know the idea of having enough set aside to spend when the market's being somewhat volatile and then being in, you know high quality stocks for the growth portion and how that functions and they have annuities. Or, like you know, you kind of create for lack of a better word your own annuity by making an income stream that you don't have to pay for. Like you know, you don't have to pay somebody 3% to create your own annuity stream and have your money locked up where you can take distributions. As long as you structure it properly, it should last and as long as you're not withdrawing too much, it should last. So when you explain the whole concept of that and still participating in the market but having enough set aside to live off of, they're not scared. Where they feel like they have to put it in an annuity stream so it lasts for them. I had a prospect call in.

Speaker 3

It was a five o'clock meeting and I was exhausted from some pretty intense meetings earlier in the day I think three of them actually. Yeah, and I didn't have much patience with him. At least I didn't feel like I did. He seemed appreciative at the end of the call but, um, he was trying to his. His whole premise was he was trying to figure out how to liquidate his portfolio and he wanted to buy physical gold and put it in his house. And I'm like I don't know why you would do that. He's like, well, I just sense the market's going to fall apart and I'm like this is a blue collar guy Just working every day. No, no, formal education not, definitely not business school. And and there's nothing wrong with that, we have a lot of clients that are that are like that. They just trust us to do what's best with their money yeah and um, but yeah, he was actually trying to do that.

Speaker 3

he's like so you don't think the markets are going to just fall apart? And I said, even if the markets do fall apart, you're better off in the stock market than you are putting a hundred percent of your wealth in gold. It's like how are you, how are you going to take that gold and purchase things and buy things, and how's that gold going to generate income for you?

Speaker 1

And you're going to chisel. What are you going to bring a chisel to the grocery store? I don't know If we're there we have bigger problems, right, I know, right or chiseling stuff to pay for goods at grocery stores.

Speaker 3

He got a little political in the conversation. I just kind of tell him it doesn't matter who the president is, delta's going to still sell you seeds, coke, still still sell you soda. Um, airbnb, so they'll rent you a house, you know. So I, I, I just don't. If you, if you have gold in your portfolio and it's a diversification play, you haven't done poorly and I would not fault you for that. But I think it's got to be a limitation on it, like I would say more than 10 and probably no less than three, because you know you wonder if they can make a difference in the portfolio now wiser.

Speaker 3

We don't do that, we don't. We're not. We're not big active traders and I think you have to be an active trader of gold to to make a big difference in the portfolio. Um, my father-in-law, I mean, he bought these coin, every coin. On late night tv he would buy one of those things and when he passed away, my mother-in-law sold all that stuff back to the coin shop. He had all the receipts attached to each one didn't make a dime I was gonna say, would he be better in the market?

Speaker 1

probably. I mean, that's where it's like, you know didn't make a dime, um.

Speaker 3

So I mean, he's been not been with us for 10 years, so it's uh, it was probably two years ago that she did the liquidation, so she probably been a little better off now. But anyway, I I I wouldn't say, oh my gosh, there's gold in your portfolio. It's horrible, why would you do that? I think just moderation inside a portfolio kind of makes sense, but it's only going to help you in certain time periods and it's going to go dark for a really long time. You're really no different than commodities. We had commodities in our portfolios for a decade and did nothing for us and in the end I was like you know what, we're better off in the S&P than we are in commodities and we made a switch a long time ago. We made that switch but you know it's.

Speaker 3

There are other alternatives to physical gold. You can buy the ETF, which is GLD and IAU. Those are the two most popular ones and when you buy the ETF you eliminate this whole spot price thing, coin shop. You know, with with this large spreads there's still a spread, but it's it's a lot tighter in the ETF. But if you're a doomsday or you don't want to buy the ETF because that ETF is not going to help you if the whole world falls apart and there's zombies running down the street. So in that case you're going to need the physical gold and you're safe, right.

Speaker 1

Yeah, but physical gold to your point, like you know, you have to insure it, you have to protect it, you have to move it. I've heard of people selling their whole portfolios and buying just truckloads of gold and it's like how do you protect yourself in that and where do you put it?

Speaker 3

and well, that's where the guns come. You gotta have the guns right, like I mean. You don't move the house ever, you just I mean that's the safe waiting for them to come that's drastic, right.

Speaker 1

I mean, selling everything and going into one thing is just drastic in general, that's just a. You know, burying it in the backyard, that's just drastic Right, but it's still. You know. No, we didn't even talk about you talked about the entrance fees to get in and the entrance fees to get out. But what about the taxes on it too? It's, it's a higher tax, it's. It's it's taxed at um 28% capital gains rate instead of the standard 15 and 20% capital gains rate if it's held long term. So you know it's higher taxes too, which, again, it's not really the play for it to appreciate. It's really to protect. You know the. The principle is usually why people go into gold to protect. You know the principle is usually why people go into gold, so you know, so that you don't have a downturn, or then, when prices are high, you know it helps combat that, but it hasn't always acted in that way, and so, if you're looking at appreciation.

Speaker 1

It's not really that type of investment. I don't think in my opinion.

Speaker 3

If you want protection, you want short-term, you have short-term treasuries. That's what you want. If you, if you go on beyond that again, just if you think the whole world is going to fall apart and you're going to move out and live on the grid, then I guess gold kind of fits the lifestyle. I guess somewhat, but again I don't. Like I said, if you had it in your portfolio and you bought one of these ETFs, you haven't done poorly in them, but you went several years, five-plus years, where not much was happening and you were being left behind. Do you have the patience to deal with that, to look at that goose egg in the portfolio? I don't know.

Speaker 1

Well, to your point, if it is stagnant like that you know, if higher prices, if prices are rising and the cost of everything is going up, then you're not keeping up with that anyway in that investment. Maybe during times it does like the 70s and 80s and occasionally you know the couple of years that you mentioned. But I would think that would hurt you in the long run, especially with the prices to get in and out of it, especially with the higher taxation. Potentially, if it does actually grow and if it's not participating in an increase like that, how are you going to keep up with inflation?

Speaker 3

So you know, I'm just not a huge fan you know I'm just not a huge fan. The other part, too, is um. You could buy gold mining stocks, so that would generate some type of income.

Bitcoin vs. Gold

Speaker 1

It's within the industry, but it's not buying gold directly I would think those have k1s, I would think, just like the gas and oil lines you're introducing a manager risk at that point, because now the company could, did not manage itself properly and you have additional risk. So if we do like this whole creating gold with those, will those even be profitable for mining in the long run?

Speaker 3

You have to read the article to find out, but I, I, I don't think they could make enough gold to do that.

Speaker 1

Potentially it's just a changing world. It's like we're doing.

Speaker 3

I also don't want to be hypocritical, because we say we don't buy gold because there's no income. But yeah, we own Bitcoin. Yeah, that's fair. We have Bitcoin and Ethereum. So what's the difference between buying Bitcoin and Ethereum versus buying gold?

Speaker 1

Maybe the changing of the times. You're getting in at a I don't want to say early, it's not early. It's early in an ETF.

Speaker 3

I think it's early for Bitcoin.

Speaker 1

So you know you're getting in during the time period when gold was just exploding, like in the 70s. So we're starting. So maybe it's a play from that standpoint.

Speaker 3

The 70s. I thought it was like the early 1900s, when people moved to California to buy gold.

Speaker 1

This is where Andrew's the data king and I'm not. You're probably right. The gold rush was a long time ago. Math is great. History is not.

Speaker 3

Bitcoin and Ethereum. I feel like we're at the beginning of something new.

Speaker 1

You're right.

Speaker 3

Something that Robert and I talk in the podcast quite a bit about is how this gets used in the future, what the future of digital transactions look like, where gold's not that. So I see Bitcoin and Ethereum maybe more of as a technology play versus a. It's not a fear. We're not buying Bitcoin and Ethereum out of fear.

Speaker 1

No.

Speaker 3

No, no, some people would buy Bitcoin out of fear, though, because Bitcoin the whole, the whole reason I was created was because of the financial crisis. They didn't trust the world banking system anymore, so they so they created Bitcoin. That's what. That's what it was supposed to be. You can, you can do all this stuff to with the world banking system. So, yeah, I don't know. I just want to note that, because not all of our clients have it. About 16% of our clients have Bitcoin yeah.

Speaker 3

But there's some similarities. Some people call Bitcoin the digital gold.

Speaker 1

Yeah, it's a lot more volatile than gold.

Speaker 3

It certainly is, but I would say, if you're, talking to a 20 to 30 year old, right now they're not buying gold. They're going to be buying Bitcoin, where, if you talk to a 70 to 90 year old, they're buying gold.

Speaker 1

Right, so is it the changing of you know, changing of times, or changing of a new generation? And so that's what gold is. It's just demand versus. You know that's it and and, and, that you could say that about any stock, though. Right, it's like, okay, it's demand of their product is you know, but there's no, you can't see how it's performing, you can't see how the CEO is made, you can't see the if it's profitable. It's just more speculative in nature, and so if the younger generation and the up and comers aren't buying it eventually, I mean, will that shift? Or, you know, it remains to be seen, because they're buying Bitcoin.

Speaker 3

Right.

Speaker 1

They've adapted?

Speaker 3

I've always wondered that that, like who decided gold was like gold. Like who decided that this was, who decided that this was precious I don't, I don't like diamonds. Like who decided this is, this, is going to be really valuable. Like who's to say, fool's gold isn't valuable right, right, I Right, I don't know.

Speaker 1

I hear you. Whoever they are, they decided. And we're just like we're just the people following who they are. The very beginning of time we're told that, Casey.

Speaker 3

The very beginning of time, someone decided all this stuff is valuable.

Speaker 1

Because we're just doing what we're told. Like it's kind of scary actually. It's like really really, is it valuable? Is it to you valuable? I don't know, because I can tell you what my girls like silver they're like I don't really like. Do I have one that likes gold? But they don't like it's all about the color, it's not really about the rarity of it, it's what matches with the outfits, right. So I don't know what matches with the skin tone is what matters.

Speaker 1

So I don't I don't know that they care that it's real or not.

Generational Investing Preferences

Speaker 3

All right, good conversation, shauna. Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you're interested in learning more, about. Wiser Wealth Management and want to schedule a consultation, meet one of our fiduciary financial advisors. You can do so by going to wiserinvestorcom or you can click on the link in the episode notes. We'll see you guys next week. Bye, Shauna.

Speaker 1

Take care notes.

Speaker 2

We'll see you guys next week. Bye, john, take care, head to wiserinvestorcom and reach out Investor Advisor with the SEC. The host and or guests may personally own securities, digital assets or other investment vehicles mentioned on this podcast. Neither the host nor guests of the show are compensated for their participation and no referral fees are paid to or received by any host or guest for clients, listeners or similar interests. Investments involve risk and, unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed. Be sure to first consult with a qualified financial advisor, tax, professional, insurance professional and or legal professional before implementing any strategy discussed herein. Past performance is not indicative of future performance.