Retain high bullion integrity in a professional vault
Good Delivery bars have high integrity because they have never been in private possession. From the day they're first manufactured they are kept in bullion vaults recognized and monitored by the local gold dealing community. Every time bars are moved - by accredited bullion couriers - a careful record is maintained, showing continuous storage through trusted hands. This guarantees gold bar integrity in a way that keeping gold at home, or even in safety deposit boxes, simply cannot match.
The result is that a professional buyer's vault will accept deliveries of these bars direct from the seller's vault without re-checking their purity. The seller gets paid quickly and efficiently, and bullion trading costs are much reduced for both buyer and seller. This is what Good Delivery bars are all about, and it's why the high volume, high integrity, professional bullion market is the only place where a sale of gold nets the seller the widely published bullion price.
Good Delivery bars are large - usually 400 troy ounces each (12.4kg), and at $1,600 an ounce that's $640,000 a bar.
Yet even having enough money to buy a whole bar or two only solves half the problem. You still need that key relationship with a formally recognized bullion vault to look after the gold while you own it. Otherwise your gold loses its guaranteed acceptance as 'Good Delivery', and cannot easily be sold at full price. But those vaults are ultra-cautious and typically don't deal with the general public. Even if you did spend the considerable time, cost and effort of setting up a vaulting account with one of them you'd find the minimum monthly storage fee means you'd need about 15 big bars of gold to get an economic rate for bar storage.
These are the barriers which keep private users out of the professional bullion market.
Direct Access To The Best Gold Prices
BullionVault.com changes all this. It enables people from all over the world to own professional market gold and keep it in any quantity in officially recognized bullion vaults in one or more of several different vaulting locations worldwide.
All BullionVault gold is held in Good Delivery form. So when you come to sell, your buyer is able to trust the purity and weight of your gold, which is guaranteed by BullionVault itself, because we know that you never had the opportunity to corrupt it.
Most people who buy gold don't stop to consider how important bullion integrity is going to be when they come to sell, but it will be critical to the price they get. Too much money is lost by gold investors who find out that lower integrity bullion has a higher premium and simply does not fetch the spot price when it is handed back over the counter. The round-trip dealing costs (i.e. buying and selling) for bullion coins and small bars is usually about 7% to 10%, and it stretched to 20% in late 2008.
Your trading costs on BullionVault are much lower. When you buy or sell you pay a commission whose maximum rate is 0.5%, falling progressively when you invest above $75,000 to just 0.05%. The round-trip costs you 1% on small amounts, falling to an incredible 0.1% for larger customers.
You can start buying gold in amounts as low as 1 gram which is much smaller than the smallest coin. There's no upper limit. You can deal thousands of ounces if you want to. In fact you should call us (+44 20 8600 0130) if you want to deal more than 800 oz. We can save you even more money on orders of this size.
Storage charges are very low too. BullionVault charges 0.12% pa ($4 per month minimum) with insurance included. That's less than a tenth of the storage fees charged by retail banks, and less than a third of the annual fees charged by typical exchange-traded gold funds, known as Gold ETFs. (We'll explain later how banks' use of allocated/unallocated gold causes them to grossly overcharge for bullion storage.)
