Inflation Hedge
An inflation hedge is an investment intended to protect the investor against— hedge—a decrease in the purchasing power of money—inflation. There is no investment known to be a successful hedge in all inflationary environments, just as there is no asset class guaranteed to increase in value in non-inflationary times. Conventional strategies for protecting wealth from inflation normally involve diversification into traditional assets like common stocks, gold, fixed-income securities, and real estate, but new strategies have value-generating assets like solar photovoltaics. Overview Inflation can impact investment decisions by making it difficult to predict future prices. This makes it risky to invest in certain assets, such as commodities, that may be impacted by inflation. Inflation can erode the value of investments over time. This is why it is important for investors to consider inflation when making investment decisions. ''Barron's Finance & Investment Handbook'' state ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Hedge (finance)
A hedge is an investment Position (finance), position intended to offset potential losses or gains that may be incurred by a companion investment. A hedge can be constructed from many types of financial instruments, including stocks, exchange-traded funds, insurance policy, insurance, forward contracts, swap (finance), swaps, option (finance), options, gambles, many types of Over-the-counter (finance), over-the-counter and Derivative (finance), derivative products, and futures contracts. Public futures markets were established in the 19th century to allow transparent, standardized, and efficient hedging of agricultural commodity prices; they have since expanded to include futures contracts for hedging the values of Energy derivative, energy, precious metals, foreign currency, and interest rate fluctuations. Etymology Hedging is the practice of taking a position in one market to offset and balance against the risk adopted by assuming a position in a contrary or opposing market o ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Digital Gold Currency
Digital gold currency (or DGC) is a form of electronic money (or digital currency) based on mass units of gold. It is a kind of representative money, like a gold certificate (United States), US paper gold certificate at the time (from 1873 to 1933) that these were exchangeable for gold on demand. The typical unit of account for such currency is linked to grams or troy ounces of gold, although other units such as the gold dinar are sometimes used. DGCs are backed by gold through unallocated or allocated gold storage. Digital gold currencies are issued by a number of companies, each of which provides a system that enables users to pay each other in units that hold the same value as gold bullion. These competing providers issue a type of independent currency. The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe is also issuing the ZiG, a digital token backed by gold, which has also been granted legal tender status. Features Universal currency Proponents claim that DGC offers a truly global and bor ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Inflation-indexed Bond
Daily inflation-indexed bonds (also known as inflation-linked bonds or colloquially as linkers) are bonds where the principal is indexed to inflation or deflation on a daily basis. They are thus designed to hedge the inflation risk of a bond. The first known inflation-indexed bond was issued by the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1780. The market has grown dramatically since the British government began issuing inflation-linked Gilts in 1981. As of 2019, government-issued inflation-linked bonds comprise over $3.1 trillion of the international debt market. The inflation-linked market primarily consists of sovereign bonds, with privately issued inflation-linked bonds constituting a small portion of the market. Structure Daily inflation-indexed bonds pay a periodic coupon that is equal to the product of the principal and the nominal coupon rate. For some bonds, such as in the case of TIPS, the underlying principal of the bond changes, which results in a higher interest paymen ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Goldback
The Goldback is a fractional gold commercial product marketed as a local currency and commodity which has seen limited use in some U.S. states, and is sold and marketed by Goldback, Inc. of Utah. The Goldback contains a thin layer of gold within a polymer coating equivalent to 1/1000 of an ounce. Overview Goldbacks are shaped like banknotes but contain a small amount of 24 karat gold. The gold is contained between two layers of clear, decorated polyester. Goldbacks are sold in increments labelled 1/2, 1, 2, 5, 10, 25, 50, and 100 each containing proportionally larger amounts of gold. Goldbacks are minted by Valaurum, a private mint. Valaurum uses a vacuum deposition process to fuse gold together into thin sheets encased in a plastic film designed to hold the gold. The Utah Goldback was released in 2019, with series for Nevada, New Hampshire, Wyoming, and South Dakota launched in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023 respectively. The Florida series was released on January 15 of 2025 ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Gold
Gold is a chemical element; it has chemical symbol Au (from Latin ) and atomic number 79. In its pure form, it is a brightness, bright, slightly orange-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile metal. Chemically, gold is a transition metal, a group 11 element, and one of the noble metals. It is one of the least reactivity (chemistry), reactive chemical elements, being the second-lowest in the reactivity series. It is solid under standard temperature and pressure, standard conditions. Gold often occurs in free elemental (native state (metallurgy), native state), as gold nugget, nuggets or grains, in rock (geology), rocks, vein (geology), veins, and alluvial deposits. It occurs in a solid solution series with the native element silver (as in electrum), naturally alloyed with other metals like copper and palladium, and mineral inclusions such as within pyrite. Less commonly, it occurs in minerals as gold compounds, often with tellurium (gold tellurides). Gold is resistant to ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Speculation
In finance, speculation is the purchase of an asset (a commodity, good (economics), goods, or real estate) with the hope that it will become more valuable in a brief amount of time. It can also refer to short sales in which the speculator hopes for a decline in value. Many speculators pay little attention to the fundamental value of a security and instead focus purely on price movements. In principle, speculation can involve any tradable good or financial instrument. Speculators are particularly common in the markets for stocks, bond (finance), bonds, commodity futures, currency, currencies, cryptocurrency, fine art, collectibles, real estate, and derivative (finance), financial derivatives. Speculators play one of four primary roles in financial markets, along with hedge (finance), hedgers, who engage in transactions to offset some other pre-existing risk, arbitrageurs who seek to profit from situations where Fungibility, fungible instruments trade at different prices in dif ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Platinum
Platinum is a chemical element; it has Symbol (chemistry), symbol Pt and atomic number 78. It is a density, dense, malleable, ductility, ductile, highly unreactive, precious metal, precious, silverish-white transition metal. Its name originates from Spanish language, Spanish , a diminutive of "silver". Platinum is a member of the platinum group of elements and group 10 element, group 10 of the periodic table of elements. It has six naturally occurring isotopes. It is one of the Abundance of elements in Earth's crust, rarer elements in Earth's crust, with an average abundance of approximately 5 microgram, μg/kg, making platinum about 30 times rarer than gold. It occurs in some nickel and copper ores along with some Native element mineral, native deposits, with 90% of current production from deposits across Russia's Ural Mountains, Colombia, the Sudbury Basin, Sudbury basin of Canada, and a large reserve in South Africa. Because of its scarcity in Earth's crust, only a f ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Silver
Silver is a chemical element; it has Symbol (chemistry), symbol Ag () and atomic number 47. A soft, whitish-gray, lustrous transition metal, it exhibits the highest electrical conductivity, thermal conductivity, and reflectivity of any metal. Silver is found in the Earth's crust in the pure, free elemental form ("native metal, native silver"), as an alloy with gold and other metals, and in minerals such as argentite and chlorargyrite. Most silver is produced as a byproduct of copper, gold, lead, and zinc Refining (metallurgy), refining. Silver has long been valued as a precious metal. Silver metal is used in many bullion coins, sometimes bimetallism, alongside gold: while it is more abundant than gold, it is much less abundant as a native metal. Its purity is typically measured on a per-mille basis; a 94%-pure alloy is described as "0.940 fine". As one of the seven metals of antiquity, silver has had an enduring role in most human cultures. Other than in currency and as an in ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Bitcoin
Bitcoin (abbreviation: BTC; Currency symbol, sign: ₿) is the first Decentralized application, decentralized cryptocurrency. Based on a free-market ideology, bitcoin was invented in 2008 when an unknown entity published a white paper under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto. Use of bitcoin as a currency began in 2009, with the release of its open-source software, open-source implementation. In 2021, Bitcoin in El Salvador, El Salvador adopted it as legal tender. It is mostly seen as an investment and has been described by some scholars as an economic bubble. As bitcoin is pseudonymous, Cryptocurrency and crime, its use by criminals has attracted the attention of regulators, leading to Legality of cryptocurrency by country or territory, its ban by several countries . Bitcoin works through the collaboration of computers, each of which acts as a Node (networking), node in the peer-to-peer bitcoin network. Each node maintains an independent copy of a public distributed ledger of ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Purchasing Power
Purchasing power refers to the amount of products and services available for purchase with a certain currency unit. For example, if you took one unit of cash to a store in the 1950s, you could buy more products than you could now, showing that the currency had more purchasing power back then. If one's income remains constant but prices rise, their purchasing power decreases. Inflation does not always result in decreased purchasing power, especially if income exceeds price levels. A larger real income means more purchasing power, as it corresponds to the income itself. Traditionally, the purchasing power of money depended heavily upon the local value of gold and silver, but was also made subject to the availability and demand of certain goods on the market. Most modern fiat currencies, like US dollars, are traded against each other and commodity money in the secondary market for the purpose of international Balance transfer, transfer of payment for goods and services. Scottish ec ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Money Market Fund
A money market fund (also called a money market mutual fund) is an open-end mutual fund that invests in short-term debt securities such as US Treasury bills and commercial paper. Money market funds are managed with the goal of maintaining a highly stable asset value through liquid investments, while paying income to investors in the form of dividends. Although they are not insured against loss, actual losses have been quite rare in practice. Regulated in the United States under the Investment Company Act of 1940, and in Europe under Regulation 2017/1131, money market funds are important providers of liquidity to financial intermediaries. Explanation Money market funds seek to limit exposure to losses due to credit, market, and liquidity risks. Money market funds in the United States are regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) under the Investment Company Act of 1940. Rule 2a-7 of the act restricts the quality, maturity and diversity of investments by money ma ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |