5 investment lessons from TED’s video about Gold. A TED-Ed video by David Lunney

The Source of Gold

Can we learn any investment lessons from TED-Ed’s facinating video posted online late last week? CERN Scientist David Lunney discussed the scientific history of gold, explaining how the precious metal actually comes from space, and the efforts of science and mining to find or create more. You can watch the full video below.

During the video, Mr Lunney highlights several points surrounding the creation of gold and shows us that, although it is technically possible, even modern scientific techniques would take millions of years to produce just one single gram of gold!

The video also discusses the limits of traditional mining when it comes to accessing the gold already on the planet. For example; did you know that the amount of gold mined so far – in the history of gold mining – would only fill three Olympic swimming pools. That’s in a period spanning several thousand years!

Investment Lessons

Here are a few other valuable investment lessons we can derive from this educational video:

1. However much we’d like to produce more gold, we’ve been trying for years and it’s not really possible. This differentiates gold from paper currency, where quantitative easing simply prints more!

2. The fact that gold comes from supernovas helps explain two important elements. Firstly that it’s unlikely to happen again any time soon – therefore we can only mine what we currently have on the planet. Secondly, that there is some basis for gold’s mystical appeal, given that it doesn’t come from this planet!

3. We’ve mined gold for thousands of years and we can still only fill three swimming pools. This demonstrates the limitation of gold supply and why it’s called precious!

4. Mining in the sea is too expensive and time consuming to make it worthwhile, meaning we’re limited to mining the land.

5. Even technology can’t produce more gold. Particle separators would take millions of years to produce just 1g of gold.

Certainly we’d conclude it’s much easier to buy a coin now, rather than wait millions of years for that large hadron collider to produce a nugget or two!

If you would like to talk to Physical Gold about owning a portion of the world’s precious (and limited) gold, then you can speak with one of our specialist gold consultants by completing the form here, emailing info@physicalgold.co.uk or calling us on 020 7060 9992.