When they say, ‘don’t put all your eggs in one basket’, they mean diversifying your choices and not relying on one singular thing to gain success. With the launch of Goldie, Kiwis are introduced to another basket they can put their eggs in.
Investment trading platforms are taking over, but Goldie is unlike the others and will be a first for New Zealand.
Goldie is the first investment trading platform in NZ to source, price and offer shares in physical assets or in other words, gold bars.
For the first time, Kiwis will be able to invest in real, tangible bars, giving users access to gold at the same price per gram as traditional gold investors who are paying by the kilogram.
Cam Maclachlan and Glen Jenkins, everyday retail investors, are the brains behind Goldie, working on the project for three years now.
For both Maclachlan and Jenkins, they noticed a problem in the industry that prevented them from investing in ‘real high value assets’.
“We looked into purchasing a real asset, one gram of gold in the market. And we found that at the time the price was $151 per gram and took weeks to arrive, when the market price for gold was $96 per gram, so 57% increase on what that was,” explains Maclachlan.
This is the problem they wanted to fix, and the solution was creating the platform Goldie.
“We’re New Zealand’s first investment platform for owning small shares in real assets or things and so we cross out the idea of using the word assets and replace it with things,” adds Maclachlan.
“This is all about us trying to help with financial literacy, listening to our community and removing the barriers, breaking the stigma of what an investment platform or has been in the past or how it speaks to the wider community.”
In a realm where platforms like Hatch and Sharesies are doing so well, Goldie is all about “joining them” to increase financial literacy.
Through Goldie, Maclachlan and Jenkins are hoping they make financial literacy easy and fun by making the experience easy to understand, while also “amplifying” the fun of investing in real assets.
“The idea and the opportunity with Goldie is it’s a simple, easy, you put your money in, it’s a safe investment, and you have fun with it. You don’t feel like you need to be an expert of investing,” says Maclachlan.
But Goldie is about more than just making the experience fun for newcomers; it is also giving investors another safe and diverse investment option in their portfolios.
Whereas gold investing has traditionally been seen as an area for high net worth or high wealth individuals, through Goldie, Maclachlan and Jenkins hope to expand that market.
Jenkins says that in order to make Goldie a fun and easy-to-learn concept, they have leveraged their technology to make investing in real assets accessible.
“Our technology is the thing that makes it all possible. So whilst we get access to real assets, we do it in a new way leveraging technology, it’s just that end product is actually real,” Jenkins adds.
Investing in a gold bar is easy, only taking less than five minutes and follows similar processes other platforms like Sharesies go by.
Though this is a Kiwi platform, Maclachlan and Jenkins hope to take it across the world.
“We think we’ve got something unique here, we think we’ve got something that retail investors deserve. There’s no reason they shouldn’t have it,” adds Jenkins.
Not only do they hope to go global along the road, but Maclachlan and Jenkins hope to introduce more physical assets such as art and collectibles.
“If we hear the community wants Pokemon cards, if they want Michael Jordan’s basketball shoe, if they want to have these connections with things they’ve never connected with before, we can over time start reaching more communities, more hobbies, more passionate groups and start listening to them,” says Maclachlan.
“It’s about people connecting with real things, so as Kiwis to connect with a real asset that you’ve invested in is a special thing,” Jenkins says.
