BullionVault

Exactly what you'd want from a gold broker

I've been looking around the market for some time. I wanted physical gold to protect my savings, no matter what happens in Athens and Brussels.

I was sure that I did not want to buy into ETFs, unallocated precious metal accounts or anything similar that could still be wiped out by tail risks becoming reality. Nor did I want to take actual custody of gold coins that can only be sold at a significant discount, and could be troublesome to get out through the borders. Nor did I want the offers of shady MLM companies trying to sell me "the right to own gold" at little-known banks for ridiculous premiums and inflexible, insurance-like plans.

Thankfully, Bullionvault is none of those.
It is a no-nonsense on-line market of precious metal for small-scale (but sophisticated) investors. I absolutely love it.
It has extremely low dealing and storage charges, a vast community of investors, many of them running automated trading bots fulfilling a marketmaking role (making for a super-liquid market for anything from single gram of gold to entire bars), global market prices with spreads created entirely by the traders themselves (thus possible to beat with clever dealing) and even so, generally far below 1%.
Also, the gold is physically yours, evidenced by a daily PUBLIC audit, so you're covered for the tail of tail risks.

I don't know of a better solution for holding gold as a private individual currently.