This week, the Goldnomics podcast ranks the safest ways to own gold to the least safe. The safest is, of course, owning physical gold bars. The next safest is to own allocated and segregated gold, which is owning physical gold kept in a separate physical account. The next level of safety is unallocated gold, then there are physically backed-ETFs and non-physically backed ETFs.

Further out the safety spectrum is owning shares of gold miners, which trade like equities (because they are). However, the vast majority of investors own gold via an ETF.