Gold Investments: Strategies and Insights with Deven Soni

Among all the valuable metals, gold stands out as the preferred choice for investment. Unlike fiat currency, gold has consistently retained its value over the centuries. Many view gold as a means to transfer and safeguard their wealth from one generation to another. However, in the present, is investing in gold still a profitable option? In this engaging episode, I sit down with Deven Soni, a seasoned private investor with a strong focus on alternative and digital assets. Join us for an insightful discussion as we dive into the world of gold, exploring its unique characteristics, inflation rates, and what sets gold apart from the world of cryptocurrencies. Tune in and gain valuable insights from our expert guest! --- Listen to the podcast here: Gold Investments: Strategies and Insights with Deven Soni Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. I’m back here, episode number 101, after taking a little bit of a summer off. Hopefully, you checked out the 100th episode where I got my friend and podcast host, Luana Bossetti, to interview me and talk about my new endeavors. But here we are at the end of the summer, right back to the same format of interviewing people who pursue their true passions in life, pursue something that they really want to see in the world. We’re going to start off this kind of new season, kind of new time here with my guest today, Deven Soni, who is the co-founder and CEO of the Matador Network. --- Deven, welcome to the program. Great. Thank you for having me. Yeah, thank you very much for joining us from lovely Las Vegas, Nevada. Always a wonderful place. And let’s start off telling us a little bit about the Matador Network. It’s kind of an alternate way that people can invest their money. Absolutely. So, what matter really is that, at the end of the day, is a company, lots of people buy, sell, and trade precious metals, starting with gold in a really easy streamlined fashion, the same way that they could buy stocks with Matador or crypto tokens with Coinbase. It’s just really an easy, streamlined way for people to participate in the precious metals economy. I know we just went through a period, potentially still in this period or have another period again where people are really concerned about inflation and people are wanting hedges against that and hedges against kind of the entire expansion of the monetary supply, which has really been going on in earnest for a little over 15 years now. So what does the precious metals offer that, say, something like bitcoin, what’s the difference between when someone’s going to want to invest in one versus the other? Absolutely, that’s a great question. It’s a really interesting one. I’m going to take a little digression because I think when you think about gold, historically, or precious metals over the last 500 years or hundreds of years, it’s been sort of that mainstream go-to asset when times get rough, when there’s wars, inflation, pandemics, inverted yield curve, all these things, you generally see precious metals outperform the majority of other assets. However, we really haven’t had a time like we have in the last couple of years where you’re seeing some of these issues in the world but you also have a whole variety of new assets, right? Bitcoin wasn’t around in the 80s. And, similarly, there’s just fewer options. You can go on your phone and invest in a bunch of things, fine art, whiskey, whatever, but I think our thought at Matador is really that gold and bitcoin have their own kind of places for people to buy. Digital assets are great because they kind of are investing in the future in some sense, in this idyllic world where a lot more transactions are digital, the unbanked use cryptocurrencies and if you watch crypto for the last 10 or 15 years, I think the world is certainly getting closer to that but I think there’s still a lot of challenges that haven’t been solved with blockchain. I think those are kind of regulatory where there’s certainly worlds where it becomes much harder to buy and sell it anywhere in the world, which could impact its price, and, secondly, you just have some scaling and technical issues that have led to increasing prices of transferring, so I think there’s certain risks of the dream of a kind of bitcoin or crypto-driven global currency. I think with gold, what you have is sort of this past history of performance and stores of value in many, many economic environments and climates and I think there’s a lot of things that are going sideways in the world, there’s a lot more money being printed, there’s wars out there that people have kind of gotten used to but they’re still there and a lot of risks out there. In those markets, gold had done really well but I think bitcoin and crypto is really interesting as well, just, well, the world is going to change, technology is going to progress so there’s a kind of future component to it. So when someone buys gold through the Matador Network, can you explain to us how it physically works? Because I think the old school method that people oftentimes stereotypically think of is I’m going to bury gold bars into my backyard. Absolutely, and I think like, for us, the reason we created the business and the product was really, we saw, well, look, everything else is modernized, right? It’s a lot easier to buy. You can open your bank account and do everything from your mobile phone. You can buy stocks on Robinhood from your mobile phone, but why is it when you want to buy what should be a really great asset during these times, you’ve got to go to a pawn shop or a bank, look over your shoulder with a duffel bag of money. Yeah. Like all these kind of just edge cases that people lose sleep, right? And then it turns into something that causes more stress, not less. What we really decided to do at Matador was to kind of streamline as much of that as possible by saying, well, look, you’re buying gold, that gold, we’re actually storing for you at the Royal Mint in Canada, which to us is like one of the most secure places in the world to actually store metals, it’s highly insured, it’s highly protected, and it’s highly cost effective. You buy gold using our digital app, the gold is stored at the Royal Canadian Mint, but if you do say, “Hey, I actually want this physical gold to bury in my backyard, put under my mattress, in my safe,” whatever, you can actually just push a button on our app and actually get it delivered so you kind of have the best of both worlds, which is a low-cost storage solution that’s safe but, at the same time, the option of getting your gold delivered to you. Oh, so people who genuinely want to bury it in the backyard, or I think more commonly nowadays is the people who have like a safe somewhere hidden in their wall with detailed combination. I’m guessing what I’m hearing you say, it’s like you’re responding to the market, kind of like how anyone building any business would and just say like, okay, just imagine what your customers are going to want, the range of things, and some of them are going to say, “Yeah, I want a really secure a place but not in my home,” especially if someone has an apartment, let’s say you live in New York City or somewhere like that and you’re going to move every 12 months, it’s not something you really want to have physically on you, but then if you go out to, say, stereotypically, a more rural place where people have more land and want to have everything kind of on their person and maybe have some level of mistrust even of some of the most secure institutions, they can have that experience as well. When things go wrong, people want access to their gold, you always think of like the worst-case scenario here and it’s like, okay, well, how secure really are home base and is it more likely that you get robbed or mugged, is it more likely that the world order ends completely, I think it’s probably more likely you get robbed or mugged than you can’t redeem gold from the Canadian mint so I think it’s like a risk-reward decision there that I certainly go on one way up. Yeah, for sure, and people can think their own way as well. So then, what happens when someone decides to sell the gold, for one reason or another? Yeah, so you can sell it as easy, you can buy it directly in our platform, but the one thing we really wanted to do was really ensure gold is treated like a store value, which means you don’t --- you go buy diamonds and you’re like, “Oh, I got this diamond for $10,000, I’m gonna go sell it now,” and you go to the store and they’re like, “It’s three grand, dude,” it’s one of those situations, and gold can often be the same way so what we really want to do is kind of reduce a lot of that friction and risk. So, if you see a price of $2,000 an ounce of gold on Google, we want to be able to let you buy gold as close to that price as possible and we want to be able to let you sell gold as close to that price as possible so that you’re really mitigating any loss of fees. Otherwise, you’re sitting here waiting for gold to appreciate 10 percent just to break even, which is really not what anyone’s kind of preference is when they’re making an investment. And that’s basically how it works with stocks because, and this is fairly recently but we’ve gotten stock transactions down to a quite low transaction fee, where if you buy a stock at $25 a share and you sell it at $25.15 a share, you’re probably making a profit off of that stock, albeit a very, very small one. Right, right. It’s got a fixed price where you pay $12 a trade or something, which is great. I think it’s great for the market. It’s one of the reasons, I think, that during the pandemic, a bunch of people got these stimulus checks and what ended up happening was you saw this boom in investing on