What is the World Gold Council?

The World Gold Council, popularly known by its acronym, is a non-profit organization of the leading gold producers from around the world. The non-profit association is a market development organization for the gold industry. It’s made up of 33 members, many of whom are gold mining companies.

The association’s genesis was the need to promote the use of gold and increase the demand for the material through research, lobbying, and marketing. With its headquarters in London, the WGC has a market share equivalent to three-quarters of global annual gold consumption.

Understanding WGC

At its core, the WGC exists to advocate for more gold consumption. Additionally, the association works to maximize the industry’s growth potential, mainly by monitoring, analyzing, and defending existing levels of gold consumption.

Additionally, the association also co-sponsors and sponsors research into developing novel ways of using gold or the creation of new products that contain gold as raw material. For instance, the association has successfully supported projects leading to the development of different types of jewelry containing 99% gold.

All these activities align with the non-profit organization’s specific purpose of stimulating and sustaining gold demand.

The Story of Gold

Gold originates in Ancient Egypt, with research indicating that it was first smelted around 3600 B.C.E. Today, we use gold predominantly as an investment metal. However, gold is also used in the manufacture of electronics as well as medical devices.

The vast amounts of available gold were mined in the modern, post-World War II era. There are mining operations on every continent in the world except Antarctica. Additionally, in the recent past more countries have started to exploit their gold deposits. Consequently, gold mining has become less geographically segregated and concentrated, producing more stable worldwide production. Among the producing countries include Russia, Australia, China, Canada, Ghana, Peru, and the U.S.

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The WGC & Investing in Gold

Gold has, for a long time, been an attractive investment commodity. Gold has many non-monetary uses, including electronics, jewelry, and dentistry. As such, it still has actual demand. Additionally, gold has a fixed stock, and it is impossible to counterfeit gold. We have a fixed supply of gold in the world. Furthermore, inflation and depreciation of gold’s value are limited to the speed we can mine gold.

The WGC created the first gold exchange-traded fund. Exchange-traded funds (EFTs) are marketable security that tracks commodities, indexes, index funds (and other baskets of assets) and bonds.

EFT trades like typical stocks in a stock exchange, unlike mutual funds. Additionally, EFTs attract lower fees than mutual funds shares, and they tend to have higher daily liquidity. EFTs also experience price changes throughout the day as investors buy and sell. As such, they’re considered attractive alternative investments among individual investors.

To increase the chances of making a positive investment, investors should ensure they have gold experts managing their GLD EFTs.