The inconvenient truth about gold

Many people buy gold in the hope of making a big return. But that's not the point of gold, says Bengt Saelensminde.

We expect long-term savings to deliver many times what we put in. That's what we've all come to believe is the norm. It all comes down to the beauty of compound interest.

But if you think about it, essentially what the compounding idea says is that for every hour's work you save (instead of spending) today, you can expect to get several hours of someone else's work in the future. How can that be?

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Bengt graduated from Reading University in 1994 and followed up with a master's degree in business economics.

 

He started stock market investing at the age of 13, and this eventually led to a job in the City of London in 1995. He started on a bond desk at Cantor Fitzgerald and ended up running a desk at stockbroker's Cazenove.

 

Bengt left the City in 2000 to start up his own import and beauty products business which he still runs today.