Not much contest, you might think. But if you were to buy stocks and shares in, say, a steel-making company, would you expect a delivery of girders and store them under your bed? Now although gold is pretty heavy, very few of us are likely to be able to buy enough that would present us with storage problems, but it could present a security problem, not to mention the nightmare of having it meld undetectably... 

I started investing in physical gold about a year ago. I’m a bit of a later comer to the whole gold investment thing but I’ll tell you this now – I lost a lot of money on the stock market and to be fair I did not understand what I was getting myself into. Now I just invest in gold kruggerands or sovereigns because at the end of the day I look under my bed and I know it’s a solid investment....