Gold & Precious Metals Investing: Premiums, Storage Costs, Ratios & Portfolio Role

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Convert a mixed list of coins, bars and jewellery into grams and fine troy ounces and value it at spot: the melt value, the floor under any precious-metal price.
• Compare six products by their premium over melt value, their round-trip spread and how far the price must rise before you break even, and find the product with the lowest premium.
• Compare the total cost of holding gold as a vaulted bar with a gold ETF over 1 to 20 years, find the break-even holding period and chart both cost lines.
• Calculate the gold-to-silver ratio for twelve years, standardise it as a z-score, flag the years when silver or gold looked cheap and measure what one switch would have done to your gold ounces.
• Convert a USD gold price into euros, calculate yearly nominal, real and euro returns and the compound annual growth rate after inflation.
• Build a 60/40 core, measure how gold correlates with it and chart how the portfolio's volatility changes as you add a 0–30% gold sleeve.
• Track the running peak and drawdown of gold and stocks over 24 quarters, find each one's maximum drawdown, count the quarters spent under water and the gain needed to get back to the peak.
• Let a 10% gold sleeve drift for six years, compare it with a portfolio rebalanced to 10% every year, size the gold trade at each year end and measure the difference in the final value.