How can I get my gold?
Gold bars (of 1000 g) are issued on the territory of UAE by GBULLION DMCC. Alternatively, if additional arrangements and payments are put in place, issue of bars of alternative weight is possible, along with delivery to a specified address.

In order to request gold bars, you should contact the company via the Messages section in your account, outlining the following:
In what volume would you like to get gold?
Your G-purse number (from which gB will be withdrawn);
Required date;
Your full name and your identification document number;
Is delivery required? If so, specify the address.
Within 1-2 working days you will get a response with further instructions.

There is a difference between gold payment services and gold ownership services like BullionVault, though GoldMoney might be a case of something in between.

Gold payment is primarily for the purpose of using gold as a medim of exchange, ie as a form of money. When I interviewed Paul Tustain, the founder of BullionVault, he made the interesting point that gold is not a very good form of money. On the other hand, it’s an excellent store of value.

One consequence of a gold payment system is that if someone cracks your account, they can lliterally steal your wealth. By contrast, someone breaking into your BullionVault account can sell your gold for you, and that’s about it.

Looking quickly at gBullion, there are a couple things that strike me and maybe these are just issues about how they present the information. First, there is no mention of allocated ownership of gold. They imply that such is the case, but don’t talk about the difference between allocated and unallocated gold.

Allocated means the title of ownership is in your name. BullionVault is the only service I know of that does that for practically any amount of gold. GoldMoney may do something similar but to be honest I don’t know enough about their system.

The inherent weakness of any system that allows ownership of small amounts of gold or fractions of bullion bars is that in practical reality, there is no way to deliver a fraction of a bar. BullionVault compensates for this by providing an online market where owners can buy and sell any amount. And it allows whole bars to be assigned to you, provided you have enough money in your account to cover a whole bar.

If you note on the gBullion site, they claim that they can deliver your gold to you at any time. Well, that simply isn’t true. If you own a few grams, how would they do that? My guess is for an amount less than a full bar, they would ask you to redeem that amount some other way. The simple fact is, most people using this kind of service would own small amounts and even if you had say $250,000 in your account, you would at most get a bar and then some cash.

That brings up another point, the gBullion site didn’t say anything about the size of bars. Maybe they are 100 oz bars, who knows. But that further emphasizes the weakness of their claim that they can deliver gold to you at any time.

On the whole, there is a lot of trust you have to put into any online system for owning gold. I like BullionVault because I think the founder thought through all the issues when it comes to owning gold and designed a robust and complete system with reasonable security and failsafe measures. That doesn’t mean your money is safe or that this system can be trusted.

On the whole, if you are an investor with a small amount you can allocate to gold, then bullion coins are the best bet. You can hold onto these directly or store them somehow. The cheapest way to buy bullion bars outright is to take delivery from the Comex, provided you buy at the right time. But a 100 oz bar will set you back $120,000, roughly speaking. And the Coomex discourages people from doing this because they are worried about not having enough gold on hand to settle contracts.

I know from experience it’s pretty depressing to see your position down considerably. As temporary as that may be, it always makes you wonder if selling a bit on the way up is helpful to buy more during the dips!

So March to April could be an extremely good time to go long. The road will be bumpy but there is a lot of potential upside into early next year.