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Gold Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) are special types of ETFs which invest in Gold and Gold related securities. It provides investors a means of participating in the gold bullion market without the necessity of taking physical delivery of gold. The units of these ETFs can easily be bought or sold at the stock exchange where it is listed on a real time basis.

The prices of gold ETFs move in tandem with the price of physical gold. When the price of gold moves up, the value of ETFs appreciates and vice versa.However, like all ETFs the traded price of the ETF is influenced by demand and supply dynamics, and therefore is often different from the NAV of the ETF. The NAV of the ETF reflects the end of day value of the units based on the holdings of the ETF. In case of gold ETFs since there only passive management of the fund, the NAV reflects the price of gold, after charging for expenses in fund management.

We looked at the trade data of 14 Gold ETFs. The trading volumes are volatile and at time abysmally low. As a result of such erratic trading volumes, the trade price (we used close price for analysis) facing an investor is quite different from the NAV. For instance, there have been ETFs where the daily trade volume has been as low as Rs 3000, and the corresponding difference between the NAV and the traded price is 5.6%. Which means that the traded price was 5.6% less than the price of the NAV, a trade made on such a day would’ve lead to losses for the investor.

When the traded price is more than the NAV, it means that the unit holder is getting a price for his units in excess of the actual value of investment. This can happen if the demand for units is very high. Usually a large difference in the price of the traded price and NAV corrects itself over time, as large investors would buy more units (market creating units) from the asset management company to benefit from such an arbitrage opportunity. Table 1 shows that over the past 18 months, investors of HDFC Gold ETF have been able to benefit from a trade price higher than the quoted NAV 59.6% of the times. This is a fairly good proposition for Gold ETF investors. However, this statistic is not uniform across funds.

On an average the difference between the NAV and close price do not seem too severe. However, data as presented in table 2 reflects that on certain days the deviation in price can be as large as 7.66%, which means that the NAV was that much higher than the close price. Investors need to be mindful of being caught in such a situation, especially since the difference in the NAV and trade price will not be known till the next day. Two precautions which investors can take when trading in Gold ETFs is to compare the price across other ETFs, since the unit size is the same for all (except Quantum Gold ETF, where each unit is half a gram of gold). The second precaution is to track the price of gold on that day.

Even as Gold ETFs hold the promise of providing instant liquidity during trading hours, the poor trading volumes across some of the ETFs act as a deterrent to such liquidity. Even though an investor may be able to liquidate holdings, the price discovery could be inefficient.

 

 

 

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