AAAU vs FGDL

AAAUBGoldman Sachs Physical Gold ETF

FGDLBFranklin Responsibly Sourced Gold ETF

In short

AAAU Goldman's bullion box. AAAU holds physical gold and its shares are built to reflect the metal's price minus a 0.18% fee. No manager, no strategy, no index games. Open since 2018 and now a multi-billion-dollar trust.

FGDL Gold in a vault, with two twists: the bars come with Franklin's responsible-sourcing label, and the fund charges nothing to hold them. Assets are bullion and cash, full stop.

Stated mandate

AAAU The Shares are designed to reflect the price of gold, less the Trust’s operating expenses. The Trust is not actively managed.

FGDL The Fund seeks to track the price of gold bullion, after deducting expenses. Its assets consist only of gold bullion and cash, if any.

Why people hold it

• AAAU One job, plainly done: the trust holds physical gold and its shares are designed to reflect gold's price less operating expenses. Not actively managed.
• A multi-billion-dollar, actively traded fund, the kind of scale and turnover that helps keep the share price tethered to the bullion behind it.
• Trading since 2018 with Goldman Sachs as sponsor: an established wrapper, not a recent launch hoping to gather assets.

• FGDL A 0.00% expense ratio in a cohort whose median is 0.17%. Even the cheap giants charge something (GLDM 0.10%, IAUM 0.09%, GLD 0.40%).
• Simple plumbing: a grantor trust that holds gold bullion and cash and tracks the metal's price after expenses. No futures, no swaps, no miners.
• The responsible-sourcing standard is the pitch in a group where every fund owns the same metal, and Franklin spells it out in the trust's own filings.
• Does what it says: mandate, wrapper and holdings all line up, and it sits in the upper half of the physical gold cohort.

Worth knowing

• AAAU Not the cheapest bullion on the shelf. GLDM and IAUM charge roughly a tenth of a percent and FGDL runs at zero, against 0.18% here.
• No income here. The trust has paid no distributions, so the entire result rides on the metal's price.
• Expenses come off the top: shares reflect gold's price less the trust's costs, a small ongoing drag that compounds the longer you hold.

• FGDL Thinly traded next to the category's heavyweights, which can mean wider bid/ask spreads on the way in and out.
• Bullion pays no income, and the fund makes no distributions. The gold price, less costs, is the whole story.
• Launched in 2022 and far smaller than the decade-old gold trusts, so the track record is short by cohort standards.

Full AAAU profile⁠

Full FGDL profile⁠