AAAU vs SGOL

AAAUBGoldman Sachs Physical Gold ETF

SGOLBabrdn Physical Gold Shares 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.

SGOL A 2009-vintage trust that owns actual gold bars and does exactly one job: track bullion's price after a 0.17% fee. Middle of the pack on cost, front of the pack on doing what the prospectus says.

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.

SGOL The Trust seeks to track the price of physical gold bullion, after deducting its expenses.

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.

• SGOL Plain plumbing: a grantor trust holding physical bullion, with one job written into its own documents, to track the price of gold after deducting expenses.
• Tracks the metal about as closely as the wrapper allows, one of the cleanest mandate implementations among physical gold funds.
• Trading since 2009, through several full gold cycles, and now a multi-billion-dollar fund that changes hands actively.

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.

• SGOL Cost sits at the category median: 0.17% a year, while IAUM (0.09%) and GLDM (0.10%) charge less to hold the same metal.
• Bullion throws off no income. This is a price-of-gold holding, not a cash-flow one, and the fee comes out of trust assets.
• One metal, no diversification. The shares go where gold goes, including the long flat stretches and sharp drawdowns.

Full AAAU profile⁠

Full SGOL profile⁠