Being the world’s most successful share promoters, perhaps of all time, ought to come with rewards. But the creators of the SPDR Gold Trust, the miners behind the World Gold Council, are being left behind by their creation.
There is no doubt that the exchange-traded fund was a brilliant invention for gold miners. It now holds 1,232 tonnes of the yellow metal, mined by its inventors and reburied in the vaults of HSBC in London. Its buried treasure is worth $71.6bn, and the Trust – known as GLD, its ticker – was briefly the world’s biggest ETF this summer.
That value could be seen as a direct transfer from investors to gold miners, thanks to its role in making it easy to buy gold, attracting new investors and pushing up the price.