If you’re looking to find new investments or you’ve been revamping your portfolio, you’ve probably spent the last couple of years conducting guessing games with yourself.
To wit: Are the economic issues associated with the pandemic over? How about the supply chain—is it truly fixed? Will inflation and interest rates go down or up, and how will those ups and downs affect my investment choices?
The decisions you make are critical, of course, especially if the investments you’re looking to make involve your pension or retirement funds. You need to make good decisions quickly, so let’s hone in on one key question—which is a better retirement investment, precious metals or stocks and bonds?
The Basic Considerations
Let’s start with some of the basic issues pertaining to both sets of investments. There are some truisms involved that are actually true, but there are also some myths you should quickly dispel as you make your investment decisions.
We’ll start with the stock market, which has definitely been volatile lately. That’s always been the case to some extent, but it’s been even more true recently, especially with the threat of inflation and news of a recovery sending the market into what feels like an almost weekly roller coaster of ups and downs.
That doesn’t mean stocks and bonds are necessarily a bad vehicle, but there are caveats. You can still make money in the market if you know the right companies to bet on and you stick to mostly-conservative investments, but is your portfolio built and set up to withstand the inherent volatility?
Now let’s look at precious metals. The skinny on gold, silver and other precious metal investments has always been that they’re a solid choice during hard economic times, but less lucrative when market conditions improve.
But is that really true? While experienced precious metal investors will generally acknowledge that stocks and bonds may be more lucrative in a bull market, the mostly-steady rise of the gold market in the last 5-10 years has largely proven them wrong.
Another factor to consider is the volatility of the precious metals market compared to stocks and bonds. While there have been significant price swings in both the gold and silver markets, for instance, the fact is that those swings haven’t been nearly as violent, and their recovery has generally been a lot faster.
The Knowledge Factor
Now let’s talk about knowledge as it pertains to becoming a savvy investor. Many investors looking to increase the yields of their pension fund or the value of their retirement account are often learning on the fly, and this is another factor that should be taken into consideration.
Once again, we’ll start with the market. While there is far more reliable information about making savvy trades available than there used to be, it’s still true that the learning process is still something of a maze to many investors, even those who have successfully accumulated a great retirement portfolio.
They often find themselves playing financial guessing games, which obviously isn’t a great idea in a volatile stock market when it comes to making safe investments pertaining to pension or retirement funds.
But the learning curve changes quite a bit when you go into precious metals. Gold investment, for instance, used to be a murky area for even savvy investors, many of whom believed it was based on physically hoarding a rare and precious metal.
Today, though, that’s not true at all. Gold IRAs have become a very viable vehicle for retirement investment strategies, and there’s plenty of information about how they perform and why they go up or down.
That means you can talk to plenty of experts who can give you excellent information as well as great tips and recommendations, which means you can sort through them, then pick and choose between the best gold IRA companies for your situation.
The Best Information Sources
One important caveat that pertains to both stocks and bonds and precious metal investing is that you need to do some due diligence when it comes to your information sources.