Recently, I’ve been looking into gold investing and found that many people feel a bit confused about how to buy and where to buy. In fact, gold investing is far more flexible than you might think—you don’t necessarily have to go to jewelry stores or banks to buy physical gold bars.

First, let’s talk about physical gold. If you want to buy gold bars cheaply, a Taiwan bank is a good option. Their gold bars have guaranteed quality, and their fees are also relatively transparent, with purchases starting from 100 grams. However, physical gold has a problem: it’s troublesome to store and has poor liquidity. In addition, if your transactions exceed 50,000, you need to report income tax. So unless you truly want to collect it or allocate assets, physical gold may not be the most cost-effective approach.

Over the past few years, I’ve noticed more people turning to gold savings accounts and gold ETFs—tools with lower costs and much more convenient buying and selling. A gold savings account is managed by the bank, so you don’t need to hold physical gold. Bank of Taiwan, E.SUN, and Yuanta all offer this service. For U.S. stock market gold ETFs like GLD and IAU, the management fee is only 0.25%~0.4% per year, which is significantly cheaper than Taiwan-stock ETFs.

When it comes to short-term trading, gold futures and contracts for difference (CFD) are useful. Futures can be traded 24 hours a day, and you can go long or short, but they have expiration dates and rollover costs. CFDs are even more flexible: there’s no expiration time limit, leverage can be adjusted by yourself, the entry threshold is especially low, and some platforms let you start trading with just a little over ten U.S. dollars.

As for why gold is so popular, it’s because it truly is a hedging instrument. Since the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022, the gold price has continued to rise. Recently, international gold prices have hit new highs again. Each time geopolitical risk heats up or inflation expectations rise, people start paying more attention to gold. In recent years, global central banks have net purchased gold continuously, exceeding 1,000 tons, directly supporting the increase in gold prices. Goldman Sachs previously set a target price of 4,000 dollars per ounce by mid-2026, which shows that institutional investors still have a positive outlook on gold.

However, I’d like to remind you that gold’s short-term fluctuations are indeed quite large and hard to predict. If you’re investing for the long term, the key is to find a good entry point—don’t wait until the price rises before thinking about entering. If you want to profit from short-term price spreads, you need to learn how to read the market analysis and choose the appropriate tools. Overall, when investing in gold, the most important thing is to choose a method based on your own risk tolerance and trading style—don’t blindly follow the crowd.