Monem Salam:  
Welcome to Halal Money Matters, sponsored by Saturna Capital. I'm Monem Salam, and you know, there's a lot of people, whenever I'm attending conferences or giving lectures, they ask me, is gold a good investment? And I get into this a little bit more in the in the podcast itself, but you know, gold has been a really great investment if you wanted to give it to your wife as jewelry. And so we have a special guest with us today. His name is Jon Potts, and he actually runs a custody outfit that actually can store physical gold and physical precious metals. So not only gold, but other precious metals, like silver, those type of things. So he has a really unique insight into gold as an investment, gold that's a long term hold, and maybe what's even happening right now with the current trends on what's happening with precious metals and gold. So let's get into it. I'm really excited to have Jon Potts on.

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Monem Salam:  
Thanks Jon, it's great to have you on the show.

Jon Potts:  
Glad to be here.

Monem Salam:  
I've been thinking about this topic for a very long time, and the reason is, is that, you know, so let me back up a little bit in our community and many parts of the world, including some parts of America. I mean, you know, precious metals, specifically jewelry, gold, those type of things, is always something that traditionally, has always been an investment that people made. And I think, you know, besides, let's say real estate, I think gold was probably number one up there historically, what was done. So I'm really excited about talking to you a little bit more about physical precious metals and how an investor can be able to do that. But before I wanted to ask you was that, you know, let's talk a little bit about yourself and how you got started and while you're doing that, if you can just talk about the evolution of the industry, I'd really appreciate it.

Jon Potts:  
Sure. I've been doing this for quite a long time, since the beginning of 1981 at that time, and I'll try to make this a short story. At that time, I was a building contractor in California, so I was a licensed building contractor. And for those that are listening, if you're old enough, back in 1980 the prime interest rate was 21%, crazy, that's right, so it was a really bad time to be a contractor. And essentially, I stumbled across, I had I was out of college, and I stumbled across a Refining Company, an international Refining Company called Johnson Matthey, old school, British, UK-based Refining Company.

Monem Salam:  
And they were refining precious metals?

Jon Potts:  
They were refining precious metals, and they had been refining precious metals for, at that time, 170 years. Okay? They go way, way, way back. One of the biggest, most internationally recognized refining companies was looking at opening an office in the Los Angeles area, which is where I lived. And just as luck has it, I stumbled into that job. I had no experience whatsoever. Like a lot of businesses, it was starting out in a customer service type position. And what we did, and what I did at that time was, we were a refining collection office. We were in the Jewelry District of downtown Los Angeles. And jewelers would bring their scrap metals into us, and we'd take that in and send it up to we had our refinery, North American refinery, at that time in Canada, and we would send it up there. At that same time again, this was going back to double digit inflation, 21% prime interest rate. High gold prices. Gold had rallied to $800 an ounce in 1980 and silver had rallied to $50 and started coming back down some and individuals were literally selling everything they had. Grandma's jewelry or old tea set, everything they were just bringing in and melting down to do it. So I got my start in the business on the refining side.

Monem Salam:  
So just curiosity, were they doing this more because they were desperate for money, or was it just because the gold was so high they just felt that they were should cash out?

Jon Potts:  
I think a combination of both. I mean, inflation was in its highest level ever, and people were feeling the pinch. Interest rates were super high. People were feeling the pinch, and the price happened to be very high. So it was an opportune time to sell and convert that to cash, which they needed. And a lot was going on at that time, because that was just not long after the Vietnam War ended, and the Los Angeles, Southern California area had a tremendous number of Vietnamese immigrants that came in, and they were very attuned to gold and so, so we saw a lot of that, and we saw a lot of them coming in, and they had just seen their country collapse, their currency collapse, and so those that were on the ball, so to speak, converted everything to gold, immigrated to the United States, and then now they're starting their new life over. They're selling their gold to get cash to start their restaurant, their cleaning business, whatever business it was, and so they were selling. Some years go by,  few years go by. All of a sudden, now they've seen the worst with the worst. That the, you know, the geopolitical economy can throw at them. Now they start buying again, because now they want to start accumulating it back. But it's how they save their families well being, by bringing gold over.

Monem Salam:  
So this really interesting session, I want to just stop here for a second, because there's two things that I kind of think about, and we'll, we'll continue with your with the journey as we're moving along. But number one was, is that that's really interesting, that that people actually did, that they physically brought gold over, and not in the form of jewelry. You're saying, you're saying in the form of, like bullion, or something along those lines.

Jon Potts:  
Yeah, in Asia, the Tael, which is a thin sheet of gold that's about the size of a business card, and it weighs just over two ounces. And that's a standard form of trading in Asia. And it's very nice, because, literally, you could tear them with your fingers in half. And you know, as you barter for goods and services.

Monem Salam:  
Which is interesting, because the reason I say that's because, and I hope, no, you know, CBP officers are listening. Because what a lot of people do is they'll, they'll buy the jewelry, they'll put it on themselves, and they'll walk, you know, they'll  come to the country, because then you don't have to declare, because it's personal use. It's not That's right, trading. So, so that was one thing, but the other thing was, it was interesting that you mentioned about selling the gold for, you know, emergency purpose and those type of things, you know, I never, I never really thought about it, but usually, what my always impression was is that when you buy a piece of jewelry, let's supposing you paid, you know, I don't know, $10,000 for it, whenever you try to sell it in emergency, it's always going to be probably worth less than when you actually did it. But in this particular case, you're saying maybe they might have made money. Is that kind of…

Jon Potts:  
Well, it depends on when they bought it, of course. But also the jewelry that's bought for investment, whether it's in the Middle East or Asia, not so much in Western societies, is very high heritage. It's 1822, even 24 karat gold, which is someplace between 90 and 100% gold. So unlike US markets or Western markets that are 10 karat or 14 karat, which is only 58% gold, these are very high purity. If somebody wanted to take that and change it from jewelry to a bar or a coin, they don't even have to refine because it's so pure, whereas if it's carat jewelry, like we have here in the US, then there's a refining process that makes time and money and all of that that makes discount. So it's jewelry, but from their perspective, it's an investment. Different thinking than Western thinking. So I was in the refining side of the business. From there, I moved into the commodity trading side of the business. I was doing commodity trading, which, back then, was the wild west of commodity futures and all of that. From there, I moved on to marketing, onto banking and finance, and finally into the depository side of the business. As my career evolved, I moved slowly from Los Angeles to Arizona to the east coast and about 25 years ago, I was the division vice president of a sizable regional bank, a private bank, Wilmington Trust Company, one of the DuPont Family banks, and they had a precious metals program. They chose to get out of it and 25, 26 years ago now, we basically did a management buyout of that business. And in that business, we buy, we sell, we ship, we store, precious metals, bullion products, and those products, I put the emphasis on bullion. We're not in the business of storing collectibles, rare coins or jewelry or other things. It's metal, gold, silver, platinum and palladium, that's owned for the specific purpose of investing in that commodity.

Monem Salam:  
When you're talking about it from that perspective, then I would say it kind of limits your market to institutional?

Jon Potts:  
No, not really. Ultimately, the biggest part of our business is selling to institutions, but those are institutions that are banks and brokerage houses, who are, in turn, selling it to their investors. Their individual customers, and most of this, even though we might be holding it for a big brokerage firm, that brokerage firm is really holding it for public individuals, high net worth and even not even high worth individuals, because we have, it spans the entire spectrum. We have people that will buy, you know, $200 of silver coins, and we have people that will buy $20 million of gold on the next transaction. So I don't want to say they're big investors, small investors. It's just a different niche. And we have people that have bought $20 million of gold, and they've called us up and said, Hey, I want to buy 20 ounces of silver so I can give it away as Christmas gifts. So it really runs the gamut.

Monem Salam:  
So then, so then, I guess the idea is, I, if I go to my brokerage account and I want to buy this, let's, let's just for, don't have to say precious metals. Let's just stick to gold for now. You know, if I want to buy gold, physical gold, not an ETF or something like that, which we'll get into a little bit later, and then I go to my brokerage company, I tell them, Yes, I'll do this. And then you're the back end, you're the custodian of that gold, that physical gold, that's there.

Jon Potts:  
That's correct. However, we do have, and this is where we kind of cross the line a little bit, while we do not market it in a big way, we do have a lot of individual customers that we deal with directly, because there are a lot of banks and brokerage houses that said we just don't want to be into that, we sell stocks and bonds and mutual funds. Can we just refer our customers to you directly? They'll open an account with you directly, and you could take care of them directly. And so it spans not only the size of the investment size that's going on, but also it's commercial, high net worth individuals, Mom and Pop individuals. It runs the whole gamut there.

Monem Salam:  
 Now let's get it a little bit deeper here. So now we're talking about the physical gold, and again, I'm using gold loosely. Could mean any precious metal for that matter, but let's supposing it. Now I had a choice. I could buy the physical gold, or I can buy a fund that invests in gold, right? What are in recent times, I would say, in exchange traded funds that actually invest in gold as well. So what are the kind of differences between doing those now?

Jon Potts:  
Yeah, there's a whole cadre of different investment vehicles. You can buy gold mining shares. You can buy a mutual fund that has gold in it. You can buy an ETF. You could buy commodity futures. You can buy physical gold bullion. All of them have their place, and an ETF is very simple. You can call your  brokerage house, your Morgan Stanley, your Fidelity Investments, your UBS broker whoever, and say, I want to buy. I want to buy. You know, ETF is and it's very easy, but it's a different thing. It is a paper instrument, while it may be backed or indexed to gold. It is not gold itself, and I'm personally not of the survivalist type of mindset personally, but bad things happen all the time, and there is a comfort that people get by having gold in their hands physically. If I go back to the start of my career, the Vietnamese that came up came over, having that physical gold was very important, and that kind of also points to the liquidity of it. If you buy an ETF or futures contract, you've got to go to that financial institution to buy or sell it. If you have a piece of physical gold, you can go any place in the world and do it, and they'll accept it. And now, and for example, I don't know if the US military still does this, but a gentleman I worked with was a pilot during the Vietnam War, and part of his survival kit was small gold coins. So actually, the government gave him, in addition to his compass and his knife and whatever else was in that survival kit, there were small gold coins, because any place in the world, if you get shot down or captured, you would have a way that would be recognized internationally to barter your way out of it fascinating, that that's still physical asset performs that way.

Monem Salam:  
Right. And that's really true. So, I mean, so thinking of her from that perspective. So let's supposing, you know, I go out there and I can buy a gold ETF, and then, you know, basically I have a right to something that eventually I can either sell or take delivery of. In your in your particular case of when you're custoding in the gold it's the same thing. But typically you're tying that gold bar or that gold leaf to a person, individual who had actually bought it ffrom the broker.

Jon Potts:  
That's correct. We, we basically operate a Fort Knox type of institution. So for every customer and in the industry, we refer to this as allocation, for every customer that owns a particular bar or coin, there is a bar coin sitting in our high security facilities for that customer, they can either come in and pick it up. We can ship it to them by armored carrier. We even ship up to $100,000 in value through  Federal Express, fully insured. So if somebody is storing it, just because it's a convenient safe place to store it, they know that within two days they could have it in their home in in Washington or California or Maine or Florida.

Monem Salam:  
Yeah, yeah, so and then, and then, for those the doomsayers that you were talking about. I mean, I guess from even from the perspective those Vietnamese that you did, that you, that you mentioned earlier, if from that perspective, you really would have to have the physical gold in your house. Then you live in Nevada. I live in Washington State, you know, push comes to seven. World goes to hand basket. I'm not going to drive to Nevada and be able to, Hey, Jon  , you know, where's my gold that I need to how, how would that work process work? If that was the case.

Jon Potts:  
Well, again, if it all happened overnight. That's bad for everybody, sure. But just like again, I'll go back to my original story. Yeah, it's very illustrative. Those people in Vietnam, they didn't know who was going to win the war. They didn't know how it was going to turn out. But what they what many of them started doing was converting their South Vietnamese piasters to gold as a financial insurance policy. And those that did it were good. I also had Vietnamese that came to me with bundles of South Vietnamese piasters and said, I want to buy gold. And it's like, that's just worthless paper now, and it's, and I want to say that, you know, there's a, and this will lead me to the next piece of why gold is, yes, it's financial insurance, and it's financial insurance against geopolitical and economic uncertainties and all of that. And it's great, a great diversifier. It's not always contrary to the stock market, but it's independent of the stock market, very low correlation. And so one and kind of modern portfolio theory and all of that, diversifying generally enhances your returns and lowers your overall risk. Having gold, which moves different than stocks, maybe having some of that, it may not perform as well this year, but it lets you diversify and maybe go into some stocks that you may be higher risk, higher return that you wouldn't otherwise go to. And so it has those components to it. And you know, for myself, I not only talk this business, but I walk this business. And I own gold and silver, it's not my major portion of my portfolio, but it's some because it gives me that diversification. It also gives me the ease and access and liquidity. And if, as you mentioned, if things go to hell in a hand basket, there's the financial insurance piece of it. People say, Well, Jon  , what's your cost basis and all of that. And I can tell you, absolutely I have no idea, nor do I care. If it goes to zero in value I am a very happy guy. Why? Because I'm going to give it to my children. They'll have that if they need it. But it means that everything else is rosy. The whole financial picture is rosy. So I don't look at it. I look at it as a small piece of my portfolio, and it lets me sleep well at night. It lets me diversify. It's a store of value, liquidity, all those things, and capital appreciation. Yeah, that's nice, but that's probably the last thing I look at, and it's, it's a sleep well, at night asset.

Monem Salam:  
Yeah. I mean, I think that. I mean, you mentioned a really good point. And I think when I've when I've looked at gold before in the past, what I found is that, and there's, and there's more than that. But there's three main type of investors there, there, right? Central banks, right is one. And then the other one is the person that you're talking about, the one who wants to the retail investor, is there, yes. And then you have the traders. And the traders are, which is a newer group, is what, what is now with the ETFs and the and the other things making gold a lot more tradable, that there's been a whole influx of more demand, if you want to call it for that. Which brings me to a to a question, you know, when you look at the investor, or when, when you're when you're somebody is coming up to you and talking to you about gold, are you only talking about it? From a perspective of this is a store of value which is legitimate. It's been there for, I don't know, 1000s of years as a store of value, or has, because of all these new entrants and the central banks buying more, is has it become more of an investment as well rather than just a store of value?

Jon Potts:  
it's an investment, but not a speculative investment, okay, going back to the ETFs and commodity futures. If you are in this, if you are looking at gold specifically because you believe the price in next quarter, or in six months from now, is going to be higher than it is today, buy an ETF or commodity futures. Don't buy the physicals. That's their role, for the traders, for the speculators, for those that are looking solely for capital appreciation. The physical side of the of the industry is more of a longer term investment, a portfolio diversifier, just like you might have real estate, your real estate, you're not going to run and cash out bits and pieces or anything like that, which you can actually can do that in gold. You don't have to sell all of it. You could only sell a piece of it. But that's, that's kind of the difference between the paper assets versus the physical assets.

Monem Salam:  
Yeah. And I mean, you mentioned real estate, but I think you mentioned the kind of brief one I want to highlight it. So on a real estate, if I have a house, I can't sell 10% of my house, but if I have physical gold sitting with you, in a vault, I can sell 10% of my gold of a valley. So it's, it is a little bit more liquid, if you want to call it, than probably anything that would be real estate related or something.

Jon Potts:  
Yeah, and, and there's other strategies, you know, we'll have high net worth individuals that, you know, if they're, say, buying a million dollars or $5 million of gold, they might buy, and they buy it over time to average the price. Now they have, and there's, this is a nuance of the business, a big bar, 100 ounce gold bars that's traded in, like the commodity exchanges and all that. Those are unique bars with unique serial numbers, weight finest hallmark and serial number that make that bar unique and all the world. And so from a tax perspective, let's say they bought 10 of them, these bars, 1000 ounces of gold, and they have a $3 million investment, and they want to liquidate some of it, they can go back and pick a specific bar that has a specific cost basis, depending on what they need. Selling one that has a that has no profit in it because they just bought it yesterday, or one that they bought two years ago that might have a high profit, and they say, well, for tax reasons, I only said the one that I bought yesterday, and there's no gain on it, but I've gotten my cash out, but I still have a position. So there's other things you can strategize as well with.

Monem Salam:  
Yeah, so I think in the in the parlance of, like stocks and stuff, it's a lot sales. You have basically different chunks you can you can actually do that with, the gold as well. Going back to one point that was there, I mentioned the three different ones. We know why , you know, retail people buy gold is for jewelry and those type of things we know probably why traders do it because they want to have an appreciation. Do you have some color as to why central banks buy gold?

Jon Potts:  
It's, again, the central banks are buying it really as a reserve currency. It's really to bolster their asset base, to bolster their whatever currency they have out there, because now part of their assets, of course, they have a country, and yes, the country has a GDP, and of course, they have all these things, but gold has kind of a special, and I'm not a I'm not a mystical kind of guy, but there is something very special and magical about gold. And for 5,000 years, humans have looked at it, treasured it, loved it, hoarded it, all of the gold that's ever been produced  has never gone away. It's all still in existence because it just gets, get, re-melted and recast it into something else. Nobody ever throws it away. So it has a very special connection to human beings and whether it's central governments or individuals, I think some of that is common, that it is just in our gut, a store of value, and that makes us, you know, bigger,  more successful.

Monem Salam:  
 There's always that, that base level of need that comes from the idea of, I like the way it, whatever looks or feels or however that is. So the that's, you know, when you were talking about going gold, going down to zero, I think there is a base level that probably won't be zero. It might be something, and it's based on the fact that you can always turn into jewelry, and somebody, somebody would appreciate it, and those type of things.

Jon Potts:  
And that's one of the unique things about physical precious metals. It's not just a financial asset, you know, they they're a thing. They're an element, yeah, a fundamental element. And those elements are used in everyday life. Silver. All of the photovoltaic, all of the solar panels in the world use silver, all of our electrical contacts, our electrical grids, our contacts, aerospace, vehicles have gold and silver as electrical connectors. Platinum is used as a catalyst to make gasoline and to make fuel and 1000 other places. So they're both a monetary asset, but also an industrial asset.

Monem Salam:  
That's good point. And then one last one, one other thing that I wanted to ask you about was, you know, and again, looking at it from a from perspective of, if I go out there and buy a gold ETF or a fund, or, you know, those things there are, there are management expenses. So for example, gold might charge the fund, the ETF might charge you a certain amount to be able to do that. And I'm assuming there are carrying costs to having physical gold as well.

Jon Potts:  
There are. And you know, from a business perspective, I shouldn't say this, but gold is very compact. If somebody buys $100,000 of gold from me. I'm happy to store it if they don't have a safe place for it. But what I'm going to say is, it's like a roll of quarters for 100,000 you can hide it in a in a light bulb. I mean, it don't pay me to store it. Just take delivery and have it. Now, if you're going to be buying and selling that and doing some other things, maybe, you know, there's a little bit of flexibility to storing it. Storing it. We have high security class three vaults, lots of security, lots of infrastructure to keep it all safe. That costs money, and we charge, you know, any place from 25 basis points to 50 basis points to keep that metal safe for you. But again, you know, if it's silver, a silver bar is the standard silver bar is about the size of a loaf of bread, and it weighs 70 pounds. You don't want that arriving on your doorstep. You know, we've, we've had, we've had, you know, not long ago there was, we had a elderly woman who had bought five of these and said, No, I want them. We warned her, and they got to her doorstep, and she couldn't even pick them up, she can't do anything. So, yeah, maybe that's more appropriate to store sure gold in large quantities. Probably more appropriate to store gold in in smaller quantities. And when I say smaller quantities, maybe $100,000 even a couple $100,000 very easy to put in your safe deposit box, and that way you're not incurring that carrying cost.

Monem Salam:  
Yeah, it's really great. And then also, just speaking of gold itself, are there different, besides the karatization you were talking about from 14, 18, 22, 24 is there a difference in the gold quality as well, from in the for example? And also from, from your perspective, could I physically buy a gold bullion in China and bring it here and let you store it?

Jon Potts:  
Yes, absolutely. And gold bullion, just the definition of bullion is really refers to gold in a quality, identifiable in a quality that is universally accepted. So for gold bars, it's usually we refer to it as two nines five which means it's 99.5% pure gold. There's a deleterious element in there, but it's very pure. It would be considered 24 Karat. There are four nines gold, which is even a higher standard, which is where refiners are at now, and the stuff that's the metal that's below that purity, unless it happens to be an acknowledged coin, or recognized coin, like the American Eagle coin, which is 22 carats, which is 91% gold. And the reason is, it contains one ounce of gold, but it has some other alloys in there, and that's in there to make it durable so it doesn't scratch and bend, because just like the old cowboy movies, when they bite on it, you know, put it that would happen with 24 karat but those are recognized. So when I we speaking about bullion, we're talking about the metal that's identifiable of a purity and quality level that people can buy and sell, almost sight unseen and it's based on the intrinsic value of the metal, not on any artistic or collectible or any other factor. And silver, same thing. Silver is usually three nines, 99.9% pure or higher. And same thing is true there all of the silver is up there.

Monem Salam:  
So then in that case, if that's the case, then gold is a gold, no matter where you get in the world.

Jon Potts:  
And pretty much. So, yep, pretty much. So yeah, we handle the Canadian Maple Leaf gold coins, the American Eagle coins, the Austrian Philharmonic coins, the Australian coins, all of those coins are recognized around the world. Different sub populations like different attributes. For example, the Asian community tends to like Maple Leafs more than gold eagles. They're both ounce of gold. They both cost the same thing and all that. But they like that, that 99.9% purity, rather than the 90% purity.

Monem Salam:  
So going back and as I was growing up again, this is, you know, bringing back memories, because I do remember, for example, when my mom used to go shopping for gold. You know, she would mention that the gold that she bought in Saudi Arabia had a different shine than the gold that she bought, for example, in Pakistan, is that the quality of the 99.9%?

Jon Potts:  
Yeah, and so and I, and, you know, when I meet with people, I might put one of the old gold Krugerrands in my hands, a gold Maple Leaf in my hand, and American Eagle in my hand. They all contain one ounce of gold. They're all valued at basically the same thing. But that Canadian Maple Leaf has kind of a brown, coppery tone, because that's the alloy in it. The American Gold Coin eagle has got a brighter, shinier brightness to it because it's alloyed with silver. And the Canadian Maple Leaf has this deep, rich gold color because it's pure gold. And they're all slightly different sizes because the density is different of those alloys.

Monem Salam:  
You know, it's interesting. I've always told my family that gold is not an investment we should be making. But I'm changing my mind now. I'll tell you that much when after having this conversation, but I would did want to ask you this, you know, when it comes to asset allocation, you know, when you talk about, you know, an age has a determining factor, and then risk has a determining factor. In this particular case, we talked about the fact that there's very low risk, it's more of a store of value. Would you say that there's a, you know, as, for example, in fixed income, as you get older, you should have an increased share of fixed income, lesser share maybe equities. Is there some kind of a, kind of a rule of thumb that you've heard, not maybe from yourself, and I'm not asking for advice, but that maybe, generally, people have said, You know what, if you're you should always have X amount in gold. Or, whereas you're getting older, you should have more or less?

Jon Potts:  
From, you know, kind of more, the advisory type of people, the CFAs, you know, CFPs, those type of people, you know, there's usually an allocation of five to 10% of a portfolio. Of course, if, if you're of the opinion that the world's going to hell in a hand basket right now, it might want to have 20% so you're not so sure, maybe you have one or 2% and so I'm in the business of risk management. I've got to keep everybody's assets safe. I've got security, internal security, external security, physical buildings, electronics. I got all of these different things and what I've learned in the 40 plus years of doing this is that risk is a very personal thing. Some person, some people having anything other than a savings account just scares the death, scares them to death. And there's other people that are going, Hey, I'm going to put all my money in Bitcoin and I can I sleep really well at night. Neither of them are right or wrong. It's just a different view, you know, and whether you believe it's going to go up, and you really believe that you want to have 20% allocation, or the 5% you know, I would say the five to 10 is probably the good guideline. And then you have to apply your personal risk tolerance to any one particular asset.

Monem Salam:  
No, I appreciate that. I know it's a difficult question to answer. I get it a lot, and I have to smirk and say, I don't know what how to answer the question. So thank you for at least giving a general guideline for this. The one last question that I have that I think would be a good, good place to be able to leave it all. Because, you know, you've been in the business for a long time, you've seen all the ups and downs, and I mean gold prices going up, and gold prices going all the way down, and those type of things. What do you think as far as the future is concerned, and I don't necessarily mean price, so don't, don't get me wrong here. But what do you think about the future of, you know, whether it be, whether it be gold, ETFs or gold, you know, physical gold, or those type of things. Are you seeing more demand coming in? And those things are always has pretty much leveled off, and it's been the same for a long time.

Jon Potts:  
Well, things have slowed down a little bit in the first couple months of this year. Right now, they're getting stirred back up. Of course, the pandemic changed everybody's life, and it changed the economy a little bit. But you can't pick any one thing. I mean when, when I was a trader, commodity traders, I'd watch the oil prices and I watched the soybean prices. What do those have to do with anything, but silver would react to them? That day is past, and you know, if a war breaks out, that would be very bullish for gold. But if a war breaks out, but the economy is great, nobody cares. If the economy is failing, but there's peace all over, nobody cares. And sometimes it's, it's, it's like a whole swarm of bees buzzing around and nobody cares. But every now and then they all come together, and then people panic and jump in. And so I am of the belief of looking at it as a portfolio diversifier, a liquid asset, financial insurance, look for that 5% weighting and buy over the long term and average your price. Because after doing this for 45 years, the reason I'm still around is because I don't know, and I know I don't know which direction the price is going. Everybody I know that says, oh, it's going up, it's going down. They end up getting clobbered someplace along the line. No, that's not its role. Just buy and not worry about it. It's a long term holding, like your real estate, some of your core assets that you have.

Monem Salam:  
Yeah, have you found, I know so one last question, but I'll ask one last question. Have you found in in cases of real or turmoil or perceived real term, for example, COVID or the GFC that happened 2008 that you see in the realm of gold? Do you see your business picking up more than for example, gold ETF, because people are becoming more scared. Or is that not a factor?

Jon Potts:  
Yeah, no, I do. I do. And our business has picked up quite a bit over the last three years, I'd say. And one is people are becoming more aware of it. People are putting it into their individual retirement accounts, which is a big part of it. And there's a greater acceptance or acknowledgement that it's not just for, you know, gold bugs, or whatever you want to call it. It's, it really is a real asset, like, you know, like owning copper or IBM stock, you know, it just is. It's a thing.

Monem Salam:  
Great. I really appreciate your time. I like it. I meant it when earlier, when I said, I'm really beginning to think differently about precious metals and gold than I did before. My investments have always been in the stock market, because that's what I know. But just being thinking about, you know about this from a new angle. Basically, this is a roundabout way of telling them, telling you my wife was right and I was wrong.

Jon Potts:  
I will point you to one place. There is, you can go online. There's a group called the World Gold Council. I've heard of it, and they do a tremendous amount of research, and it's not from picking highs or lows, but talking about some of these fundamentals. That is really a good resource for anybody out there that's thinking about gold.

Monem Salam:  
Great Jon. I really appreciate your time. You know, if there’s anything else you’d want to add to that, I’ll leave the floor to you. If not it was, it was truly a pleasure talking to you. And I’m sure our listeners will benefit from this, from this conversation.

Jon Potts:  
And I'm always happy to talk to you if you, if you walk away and go I forgot to ask this, or have additional questions, or if you or your clients want to get on a conference call and talk something through. I'm happy to do that. I'm the world's worst salesman, so I don't sell anything. I just kind of share my experience and share what I've done, and if, if that's of any help to you or you r clients, I'm always happy to talk.

Monem Salam:  
Great. Thank you so much.

Jon Potts:  
Okay, thank you. Have a great day.

[music]

Monem Salam:  
Thank you for listening to Halal Money Matters. If you like what you hear, please do rate us on the app stores and also leave us a review. It helps other people find us a lot easier.

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The thoughts and opinions expressed on Halal Money Matters do not necessarily reflect the views of Saturna Capital, Amana Mutual Funds, or their affiliates. This podcast is prepared based on information Saturna Capital deems reliable; however, Saturna Capital does not warrant the accuracy or completeness of the information. We do not provide tax, accounting, or legal advice to our clients, and all investors are advised to consult with their tax, accounting, or legal advisers regarding any potential investment. Investors should not assume that investments in the securities and/or sectors described were or will be profitable. Investors should consult with a financial adviser prior to making an investment decision. The views and information discussed in this commentary are at a specific point in time, are subject to change, and may not reflect the views of the firm as a whole. All material presented in this publication, unless specifically indicated otherwise, is under copyright to Saturna. No part of this publication may be altered in any way, copied, or distributed without the prior express written permission of Saturna Capital.

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