Buy gold and Bitcoin, we advised in our last Wealth Preserver column. Yes, but how, many of you asked.

Gold

Gold has been around for longer so this is the more straightforward asset to buy. There are a number of possible ways and to some extent it is a matter of personal preference.

There are investors who believe that the only really secure way to own gold is to have it under your direct control under lock and key. This is of course possible – just be sure to buy from a reputable dealer and have appropriate security and insurance in place.

But our portfolio exists to guard against inflation – it is not the kind of “Armageddon portfolio” that might require you to be able to put your hands on assets such as gold bars at a moment’s notice. We want to be ready for a significant rise in the retail prices index; we are not preparing for nuclear war or the collapse of society.

We are therefore ready to trust that the financial services industry will be operating as normal and that investments offered by regulated entities are safe enough ways to invest in the kind of assets we have in mind as protection against inflation.

Far more convenient than having your own strongroom, and safer in this column’s view, are indirect means of ownership such as custodianship of bars specifically allocated to you in a dealer’s vaults or gold in the form of tradable securities such as exchange-traded funds.

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Services such as BullionVault allow you to buy gold online to be held on your behalf in vaults in a variety of cities, including London and Zurich. Dealing commission is 0.5pc and storage and insurance cost 0.12pc a year. BullionVault looks after gold to the value of more than $3.8bn (£2.7bn) and is part of the tightly controlled network of professional participants in the gold market trusted to transact in the metal without the need for a check on purity every time.

There are a number of ETFs that hold physical gold to back every share in the fund. For readers not familiar with ETFs, they are a kind of amalgam of investment trust and unit trust: like the former their shares are listed on the stock market; like the latter they are “open-ended”, so shares in them can be created and cancelled at will, which prevents discounts and premiums to the value of the fund’s assets.

There is another type of ETF, known as synthetic, that does not actually own gold, instead relying on “derivative” products. These funds tend to be cheaper but Questor has misgivings and prefers those backed by physical gold. Examples include iShares Physical Gold (ticker SGLN), which costs 0.15pc a year plus your broker’s normal trading commission when you buy and has assets of $13bn.

Questor says: buy

Ticker: SGLN

Share prices at close: £25.53

Bitcoin

There are several ways to own the cryptocurrency too; some are simpler than others.

The easiest is to open an account with a company such as Revolut, whose app allows you to buy cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin at a one-off cost of 1.5pc-2.5pc; to qualify for the lower rate you need to pay a monthly fee for the service, which includes money transfers, foreign exchange and share dealing.

Questor opened an account earlier this week in minutes with the help of a smartphone camera to take a self-portrait and upload passport details.

Revolut uses an intermediary to actually deal in the Bitcoin but a spokesman said legal title remained with you, the buyer, and its own insolvency or that of the intermediary would not deprive you of your assets. Support is via a “chat” function on the app, however, and it’s not easy to speak to a human being if you have a problem.

You can also own Bitcoin more directly via an exchange such as Kraken or CoinBase. This route requires a higher level of technical ability and Questor advises anyone who takes it to research it thoroughly and test the waters first with small sums.

You have more protection if you use an ETF, which is a regulated investment. Again, you want one that is backed by actual Bitcoin as opposed to a “synthetic” fund. Examples include VanEck Vectors Bitcoin (ticker VBTC), which costs 1pc a year. Regulatory obstacles make it hard to buy from British brokers but they are available via European firms.

An early version of this article was originally published online. We apologise for the error

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