Our story begins with a closed end gold trust – GTU – that has been trading at a significant discount to its net asset value.   GTU, like its sister funds “CEF” (a mixed closed end gold and silver fund) and SBT.TO (a closed end silver trust), holds physical bullion in a Canadian vault.   Also, like its sister funds, it lacks a quality redemption feature – by which I mean: the ability to redeem units at their NAV (net asset value).   GTU’s redemption feature provides for redemption at roughly 90% of NAV.  Unlike an ETF,  a CEF (this might get confusing because we’re talking about Closed End Funds, but GTU’s sister fund actually has the ticker “CEF” also…) offers no way for market participants to create new shares: share creations must be done by the trust (they’d do an offering of shares and use the proceeds to buy bullion – if the units were trading above NAV).

Read the full article here