IAUM vs SGOL

IAUMAiShares Gold Trust Micro

SGOLBabrdn Physical Gold Shares ETF

In short

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.

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

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

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

Why people hold it

• 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.

• 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

• 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.

• 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 IAUM profile⁠

Full SGOL profile⁠