Any way individuals choose to buy gold, they can hardly go wrong (so long as they stay away from highly overpriced rare coins). The best ways to acquire the yellow metal are by buying gold bullion bars/rounds and by buying gold coins or through a tax-advantaged gold IRA account. We will look at these in some detail below.

A list of the most popular choices when buying gold bars online

When buying gold bullion bars online, you should make sure they are from a respected dealer and of the desired quality. There are number of online gold dealers, but you should only go with the most trusted, when purchasing gold bullion. Below is a list of the popular gold bars for sale online:

• Valcambi Suisse Gold Bars
• Lunar Gold Bars
• Republic Metals Corporation Gold Bars
• Elemetal Mint Gold Bars
• Fortuna Gold Bars
• Perth Mint Gold Bars
• PAMP Suisse Gold Bars
• Asahi Refining Gold Bars
• Royal Canadian Mint Gold Bars
• Credit Suisse Gold Bars

Bullion Cast Gold Bars

Bullion cast bars are the product that stands in between the well-known hand poured bar products and the minted ingots and rounds. Among the most famous of the cast bars are those produced by the world-renowned Perth Mint (Gold Bars) and the PAMP Suisse Fortuna Gold Bars. Creating these unique-looking London Good Delivery bars involves melting gold and pouring it into molds. Correct weights are achieved by positioning the molds on a balance and recording the metal’s weight as it becomes poured. This stops as the correct weight is achieved.

The bars will then either be air-cooled extensively or dunked into a water tank for super-cooling. They will be reweighed to ensure the correct composition before they receive the refiner’s stamp, serial number, and assay purity for the batch.

Gold Rounds and Minted Ingots

In some cases, the cast bars will be used as blanks for Minted Ingots. Once the proper thickness, width, length, and weight are achieved and assured with the cast bar process, the minting process continues. Today’s high-tech mints often instead utilize a continuous casting process. They feed the still-hot cast bar into a continuous casting machine. These blanks then become melted via resistance heating or induction heating in order to create the precise minted ingot shapes.

Once the lengthy annealing furnace process is completed, the blanks reach the minting press where the machines literally punch them from the strip to be struck. The designs and mint marks of the Mint will be pressed into the final product. Most dealers carry a large range of choices of such bars/ingots and rounds from a variety of the private mints of the U.S. or overseas and the international major sovereign mints. The primary difference between a bullion round and a coin is that the rounds are rarely produced by a sovereign mint and so lack any legal tender status or official face value. They also lack the fanciful detailed designs and images of the bullion coins.

Whichever gold bullion bar you decide to invest in, make sure you go with a trusted gold dealer. Here are some of the key factors to consider:

• Storage & Fees
• Policies
• Customer Service
• History&Safety
• Reputation

Taking the above criteria into consideration, we can recommend buying gold online with either BullionVault.com or RegalAssets.ae. With Regal, you can buy gold in the DMCC zone of Dubai, which is a very cost and tax effective way of purchasing bullion. They have also partnered up with Brinks, which means you have storage options worldwide.

You can learn more about the buying process at BullionVault.com in the below video: