Bullion in Malaysia gains better popularity when many private investors starts to be more interested to own some physical gold or silver similar to many other bullion fans in the world. Nowadays, other than bullion that issued by national government, there are also various private dealers that minting gold and silver coins or bars for public investment. Some dealers provide more variety of smaller fraction of sizes that makes buying bullion becomes affordable and easy. Among the most popular bullion that Malaysian will buy as investment are such as;
- Pamp Suisse Gold
- American Gold Eagle
- Emas Kijang
- Public Dinar
- Kelantan Dinar
Bullion is a measure of purity and weight to precious metal, usually gold or silver besides palladium and platinum. The word bullion originates from the older French word bouillon, which meant boiling and was the phrase for a mint or melting house. Bullion is officially recognized as genuinely a minimum of 99.5% pure of gold or silver which is normally in the shape of bars or ingots besides coins. Gold bullion bars comes in multiple sizes and categories. National governments are usually responsible to certified the purity of their minted bullion coins are also giving some numismatic value added to the bullion worth.
South African Krugerrand gold coin was the first bullion in the world to be denominated in ounces of pure gold which was launched in 1970. Note that a 100% pure bullion is impossible. The finest mass produced bullion are gold coins that go up to 99.999% purity yet somehow 99.9% purity is the regular.
Malaysia has their first issue of bullion gold coin Kijang Emas launched in 2001 which is also the 12th country in the world to produce its own bullion. It is available in three sizes containing exactly 1oz, ½o, or ¼oz and the face value of each are $200, $100 and $50 Malaysian Ringgit.
Different from jewelry, or numismatic coins, bullion has little or no artistic element in its value. Many do not understand exactly why without the artistic component a relatively useless material like gold ought to have such a high value. A bullion coin face value as currency is much below that of their value as bullion. For instance, Malaysia bullion Kijang Emas gold coin at a face value of $200 containing one troy ounce which is 31.1035g of gold but this coin is worth about $5,000 Malaysian Ringgit as bullion (as of March2013).
The price of gold bullion is primarily in accordance with major demand from companies that use gold to make jewelry and other products, and by sentiments of the overall economy for instance an investment while in times of economic uncertainty. Bullion coins buy and sell quite close to the world gold price, but you will still pay a premium of perhaps 4% if you buy in bulk quantity, and usually 8% when you buy smaller amounts. You should expect to face usually the same 4-8% lower price when you sell bullion coins back to the dealers too.
Take note that selecting a bullion dealer needs some extra effort to ensure you do not end up in some crooks business dealers. The safest is look for reputable dealers that is physically traceable with address and phone number, good track records and is local.