It's like the difference between buying groceries via Peapod.com vs. going to the grocery store and buying them in person, except in reverse.MediumTex wrote: My point really was that buying gold isn't difficult if you look into it.
Most people who are accustomed to investing by purchasing shares of this or that have never really looked into buying gold, so it may seem like a harder thing to do that it really is.
(Sort of. In my example the outcome of either method is physical groceries, while the outcome in the gold example is $14,000 in a gold ETF electronically recorded in an online brokerage account vs. ten Canadian Maple Leafs in your pocket.)
Once you get accustomed to doing it (investing, buying groceries) electronically, you start thinking how could you ever go back to doing it in person. But if you think about the fact that you do a better job of picking out fruits and vegetables of the right size, shape, ripeness and color for your family; picking packaged foods with use-by-dates furthest in the future; easily substitute one item on the shopping list for another if it is sold out or you decide the ingredients have changed for the worse; the fact that you can run into your friends at the store and chat with the staff; there may be a band playing music and company reps handing out samples: I could see how you could believe all over again that going physical for the groceries was just as easy as going electronic for them. Particularly if you're into buying groceries for reasons other than convenience.
The list above included things you cannot really do with the grocery-buying experience when buying them online. I also see that the list of grocery-related events are a pain for some people, but a joy to others.
Not that one is bad and the other is good--they're different, and those differences take on an urgency in one situation (long-term Permanent Portfolio investment in gold bullion coins) compared to another (brief Variable Portfolio speculation in ETFs).