AAAU vs IAUM

AAAUBGoldman Sachs Physical Gold ETF

IAUMAiShares Gold Trust Micro

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.

IAUM Bullion in a vault, at 0.09% a year, roughly half the typical fee among physical gold funds. This is iShares' small-fee take on owning metal, priced off the LBMA Gold Price benchmark.

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.

IAUM The Trust seeks to reflect the performance of gold, before its expenses and liabilities, by holding physical gold.

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.

• IAUM Fee is 0.09% a year against a 0.17% median for physical gold peers, a hair under GLDM (0.10%) and well under SGOL (0.17%) and AAAU (0.18%).
• Plain plumbing: a grantor trust that holds physical gold and seeks to reflect gold's performance, before expenses and liabilities, against the LBMA Gold Price.ishares.com
• A multi-billion-dollar fund that trades actively, and it tracks its gold benchmark about as closely as anything in the physical gold group.

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.

• IAUM No income here. The trust has made no distributions, so return is gold's price move minus the fee, nothing else.
• Gold swings hard on sentiment and rates, and there is no yield to cushion a drawdown.
• Launched in 2021, it is younger than the bullion trusts that anchor this category and not the deepest-traded name among them.

Full AAAU profile⁠

Full IAUM profile⁠