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Gold had a stellar start to 2026, hitting an all-time high near $5,600 per troy ounce in late January on massive inflows into gold ETFs, central bank buying, a weaker U.S. dollar and macro-uncertainty.
The precious metal has since pulled back as the war in Iran caused the dollar to strengthen and central banks to become net sellers of gold, say Mason Mendez and Awsaf Tamjid Arko, investment strategy analysts at Wells Fargo Investment Institute.
But the analysts maintain a brighter outlook for gold over the next year or so. “Easing oil disruptions should lower energy and inflation pressures, allowing central banks to return as net purchasers — especially as geopolitical risks remain,” the two write in a May 11 note. “Despite near-term selling, many countries have continued to slowly accumulate gold — signaling that gold remains in favor with central banks.”
Structurally, gold doesn’t produce cash flows like stocks or bonds. But it remains one of the few investable assets with persistently low correlation to both.
That’s because gold isn’t tied to corporate earnings or government creditworthiness. It doesn’t carry market risk or credit risk in the traditional sense, and it can’t be debased, printed or duplicated, making it especially attractive when trust in fiat currency or financial systems breaks down.
There’s no shortage of ways to add gold exposure to a portfolio. You could buy physical bullion, trade futures or invest in gold mining stocks. But, for most investors, the simplest and most accessible option is a gold exchange-traded fund.
Why buy gold ETFs?
While a gold ETF doesn’t offer physical ownership in the traditional sense, it comes with a long list of advantages that make it the better choice for most investors.
Buying physical bullion isn’t as simple as walking into a store and paying spot price. The hassle often begins at the dealer, where you’ll typically face a markup. Dealers build in their profit through the spread between the bid and ask prices. This means you’re paying a premium when you buy and likely taking a haircut when you sell. That friction exists on both ends of the transaction.
Once you’ve got that gold bar or coin, the question becomes where to store it. A safe deposit box at a bank comes with annual fees and counterparty risk. Self-storage in a home safe can work but risks personal security. And, if you’re really paranoid, you could bury it in your backyard and hope you remember where.
Then there’s the inconvenience when you want to sell. You need to retrieve the bullion, find a dealer, negotiate a price and take the cash.
From there, you still need to deposit the money into your brokerage account and wait for settlement before you can use it to buy other assets.
A gold ETF avoids all of that. You can buy and sell it in your brokerage account just like any stock. When prices rise and you want to rebalance, you can sell instantly and reallocate the proceeds right away. There’s no physical handling, no dealer spread, no delays. For convenience, liquidity and ease of use, gold ETFs are the most seamless way to gain exposure to gold.
Our methodology for finding the best gold ETFs to buy
We started by narrowing the field with a few key exclusions. The first was to leave out exchange-traded products that aren’t legally structured as ETFs.
A common example is the popular Sprott Physical Gold Trust (PHYS), which is often confused with a gold ETF. In reality, it’s a closed-end fund (CEF), meaning it issued a fixed number of shares at its initial public offering (IPO) and can’t create or redeem shares the way an ETF can.
As a result, the market price of PHYS often trades at a premium or discount to its net asset value (NAV), which introduces unnecessary complexity for long-term investors looking for clean exposure to gold prices.
We also excluded gold miner ETFs. While they’re often correlated with gold prices due to the nature of their business, they come with all the risks of owning equities. Gold mining stocks can be affected by operational issues, management decisions or even environmental mishaps.
Finally, we left out exotic products that offer daily leveraged or inverse exposure to gold. These products tend to be expensive, carry complex tax treatments such as a K-1 form and are highly volatile. They’re designed for short-term tactical traders, not long-term investors building a strategic allocation.
Once we made those cuts, we applied a three-part framework focused on fees, liquidity and reputability:
Fees: Gold ETFs used to be expensive, but competition has driven costs down. We set a maximum expense ratio of 0.40%, which works out to $40 annually on a $10,000 investment.
Liquidity: Not all gold ETFs trade efficiently. The best ones have low 30-day median bid-ask spreads that reduce the cost of entering and exiting a position. Compare this to physical bullion, where bid-ask spreads can be much wider.
Reputability: ETFs with low assets under management are more vulnerable to closure, especially those under the $50 million threshold. We raised the bar significantly by only including ETFs with at least $1 billion in AUM to ensure we focused on well-capitalized, stable options.
Here are five low-cost gold ETFs that provide efficient exposure to the precious metal.
Data is as of May 11.
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